There is engineering quality of a product or service, which is fitness to the specification, and there is perceived quality, or subjective quality, which is proportional to the distance between expectations and experience of the person asked. What is the relationship between these, between specification, requirements, expectations, and experience? This is a longstanding question in…
What conditions should a requirement satisfy, to be considered accurate? It turns out that this is a very complicated question. Two easy, yet unsatisfying ways out are (i) to think the question is irrelevant, and (ii) to claim that the validation of a requirement answers that question (i.e., if a stakeholder A gave the requirement…
There is transparency when “activities are done in an open way without secrets, so that people can trust that they are fair and honest” [1]. If there is consensus that transparency is desirable, can it be practically achieved? Or, why couldn’t it be achieved? For this to be the case, it should be possible to…
An OECD report [1] estimated that there were about 41,000 publicly traded companies in the world in 2019. Given the usual reporting requirements of listed companies, each maintains a forecast of future conditions that may matter to its financials. In other words, each of these companies has a narrative about a future, according to what…
Why is a Requirements Loop a loop, and why is it a destructive loop? Any Requirements Loop has three explanations: an explanation of requirements, of a solution to these requirements, and of how to show that the solution satisfies requirements. Simply put, if an explanation gives the mechanism generating some events of interest (as in…
An exercise I used to do with students in my Decision Analysis & Requirements Engineering lecture was to ask them to identify a problem that they have at university, and to describe it. My goal was to have them work in that lecture on problems that affected them. One group of students, in the 2019-2020…
Several examples of Requirements Loop concept instances (actual Requirements Loops) are given below. Each example is represented simply as text. No specific modeling language is used. This is because the Requirements Loop concept ignores the specifics one or of the language mix that may be best suited to represent the information which makes up an…
A “Requirements Loop” is an evidence-supported explanation of How observed events in an environment have led or are leading to the creation and persistence of those requirements, How to change the environment in order to satisfy the requirements in the future, and How to measure the change in the environment, in order to evaluate the…
Figures 1 and 2 show cost versus time; Figure 1 shows long iterations, Figure 2 short iterations. We choose to do something at time zero, at the origin of the graph in the Figure, and when we do so, we do it under some assumptions that we made at that time. Dashed red lines convey…
Can “an artificial intelligence machine be an ‘inventor’ under the Patent Act”? According to the Memorandum Opinion filed on September 2, 2021, in the case 1:20-cv-00903, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires that the inventor is one or more people [1]. An “AI machine” cannot be named an inventor on a patent that…
“Objective”, as in, for example, “what I’m saying is objective”, or “that statement is objective”, or “we need objective criteria when making these decisions”, is a complicated term. It takes a lot of effort to make sure it is understood as intended (or closely enough). It is therefore a costly word to use. Why is…
There is no single definition of the term “evidence”, and trying to make one isn’t the purpose of this text. But there are ways of telling if something might be evidence, and knowing when it clearly isn’t. Such knowledge helps you develop a taste, so to speak, in evidence. Isn’t that valuable, given how frequently you may be giving evidence to support your ideas, and how frequently others do the same to you?
Many people spent a lot of time, across centuries, trying to build good explanations, and trying to distinguish good from bad ones. While there is no consensus on what “explanation” is (always and everywhere), it is worth knowing what good explanations may have in common. It helps develop a taste in explanations, which is certainly helpful given how frequently you may need to explain something, and how often others offered explanations to you.
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be called a requirement? In Requirements Engineering research, a proposition is a requirement if and only if specific grammatical and/or communication conditions hold. I offer an alternative, that a proposition is a requirement if and only if specific contractual, economic, and engineering relationships hold….
I assume in this paper that the proposition “I cannot know your intentional states” is true. I consider its consequences on the use of so-called “intentional concepts” for Requirements Engineering. I argue that if you take this proposition to be true, then intentional concepts (e.g., goal, belief, desire, intention, etc.) start to look less relevant…