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Media Release

November 22, 2004

UniSA develops tools to expose potential project failures

Researchers at the University of South Australia have developed systems and software engineering tools to solve the problem of poor requirements being a contributing factor in project failures.

Having the right requirements or instructions is crucial to delivering the right system and producing it in the most effective manner, according to DSTO Associate Research Professor Joseph Kasser from UniSA’s Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre (SEEC).

Professor Kasser, who has been conducting research into the reasons why projects fail, said that being able to distinguish between well written and vague, badly worded requirements, and to detect missed requirements, could be the key difference between projects that work and ones that don’t.

“If we can get the requirements right, we can improve the process that leads to the end product and alleviate the cost and schedule impacts of unacceptable requirements,” Professor Kasser said.

With no tools available to alert systems engineers to badly written or missed requirements, Professor Kasser and his team conducted research using object oriented systems engineering to compile a list of attributes needed for good requirements.

SEEC is the only centre in the world that is seriously researching object oriented software in systems engineering, according to Professor Kasser, who has been working with the International Council on Systems Engineering to develop a framework and body of knowledge on object oriented systems.

Using these techniques, Professor Kasser developed a set of Prototype Educational Tools for Systems and Software (PETS) engineering that show how new concepts can be applied and the benefits that can be gained from them. Each tool is a computer program that can be used in the classroom as a teaching aid but is robust enough for use in the workplace.

“One of the problems with teaching is that some concepts are difficult to get across, for example, writing a requirement. Using the tools in the classroom helps students to gain a better understanding of the concepts and their importance in systems engineering,” Professor Kasser said.

During manual assessment of a requirements document, students focused on sentence structure and grammar, but when using the requirements tool, TIGER, to automate what they did manually, the focus of their discussion changed very quickly from grammar to the difficulty of writing good requirements.

“TIGER looks for poor words in the requirements. It has a set of poor words and explains why they are poor - perhaps because they are vague, unmeasurable, or complicated by more than one requirement in a paragraph.

“Customers don’t always know exactly what they require or can’t articulate their needs, especially in projects that span many systems. TIGER helps us to meet the real requirements by assisting with that dialogue - is this what you want, how is it different, how does what you want differ – enabling us to clarify what the customer really wants and to make more informed decisions that could save time and money,” Professor Kasser said.

“With any list of requirements, we need to be able to show that we’ve met the requirements. Currently this is not done in engineering. To counter that, we developed the tool, ACE, for acceptance criteria. When used by students, it led to a change in attitude from not even thinking about acceptance criteria, to writing good acceptance criteria.

“Other tools allow us to document risks, factor in costs and attach a priority to each requirement. This enables high priority requirements to be completed in the early stages of a project and low priority requirements that have less overall impact to be cut if there are cost overruns or funding cutbacks.

“Because the tools are as easy to use as a slide rule, students can very quickly learn how to complete a task or concept that we want to demonstrate,” Professor Kasser said.

After using the tools, students produce better documents through improved thinking processes and increased understanding of the problems that people implementing their requirements might have.

“Our ultimate aim is to use the tools in industry. For the workplace we would modify the tools and combine all of their functions into one tool because users would be looking at all of the properties at the same time.”

Professor Kasser is undertaking his second PhD at UniSA’s School of Education, which looks at how aspects of these tools change the way people work.

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