So, You Think You Are a Requirements Engineer?

So, You Think You Are a Requirements Engineer? (Poster)
Visitor: Ban Al-Ani, UCI/ISR
Faculty Host: Susan Sim, UCI/ISR
Abstract: The success of a task relies on the expertise of its owner to a great degree. But what is the anticipated expertise? In what areas? Our research intends to investigate the skill sets anticipated of requirements engineers. This paper presents a model of the varying levels of RE expertise within the context of the anticipated RE skills. Identifying the layers of RE expertise can provide more realistic expectations of the anticipated skills. This understanding can in turn be utilised to increase tool usability (by embedding appropriate support for users’ expertise), course development (by identifying the anticipated competencies a student demonstrated at the end of a course), task allocation and employment in industry (mapping skills required to a person’s expertise).
Bio: Ban Al-Ani is a Research Scientist in the Department of Informatics, School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Technology, Sydney where her research was on investigating the problem of incompletenees in the early phases of requirements development. She developed a detection and evaluation framework and conducted the first of a series of empirical studies to validate her work. Ban's research interests include requirements engineering with an emphasis on analysis, empirical studies, distributed development and group work. She is currently working with Susan Sim to investigate expertise within the context of software engineering.
Bio: Susan Elliott Sim is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine and a member of the Institute for Software Research. Her main area of research is program comprehension, in particular, tools and techniques that help software developers understand source code. She has conducted field studies at several software companies, including IBM, and Mitel. Sim is a also co-creator of GXL (Graph eXchange Language), an XML-based standard exchange format for extracted software data. Her research interests include research methodology, interoperability of reverse engineering tools, and software process for small business.