Description: The Program and Systems Engineering Division (PSE) is one of the largest divisions of Siemens Austria. It provides services ranging from planning and systems analysis over development and project control to maintenance, support, consulting and training in various fields. These include telephone and data networks, operating system software, banking and insurance software, work flow and client/server solutions, control systems and visualisation, medical systems, traffic control systems, CASE tools, multimedia, knowledge-based systems, neural networks, etc.

Despite this variety of fields, in all the projects it is highly important to correctly grasp the needs of the users of the envisaged systems to be built. Therefore, requirements engineering is crucial for the success of PSE. Unfortunately, many of the theoretical results from research in this area are not immediately applicable, since they focus primarily on formal methods and representations. In contrast, requirements in real-world projects are given rather informally. Therefore, a big gap would have to be bridged in order to achieve formal representations.

As an attempt to bridge the formality / informality gap in requirements engineering, an approach was developed that focuses on semiformal representations: RETH (Requirements Engineering Through Hypertext) uses the informal natural language statements given and more formal representations in object-oriented models of both the domain and the requirements. This approach is compatible with any current method for object-oriented analysis. The RETH method and its supporting tool have been used in real-world projects inside and outside of Siemens for several years.

Researchers associated with the project:

Dr. Hermann Kaindl

Brief CVs of Key Researchers:

Name: Dr. Hermann Kaindl

Nationality: Austrian

Email: hermann.kaindl@siemens.at

Academic Qualifications & Experience:
Dr. Hermann Kaindl is "Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Fuehrungskreis" at Siemens. He is the developer of the RETH (Requirements Engineering Through Hypertext) method and one of the principal designers of the tool supporting it. Dr. Kaindl primarily serves as a senior consultant for requirements engineering and also as a developer of the methodology for software engineering at PSE in general. His research interests include requirements engineering, object-oriented analysis and, more generally, software engineering, human-computer interaction, hypertext and hypermedia as well as artificial intelligence.

Concurrently to his work in industry, Dr. Kaindl has given lectures in computer science at the Technical University of Vienna since 1984, where he received the "venia docendi" for "Praktische Informatik" in 1989. Since then, he serves as an adjunct professor by supervising theses and being involved in the major exams of computer science students. In 1993, Dr. Kaindl received an official offer for a Full Professorship in Germany.

Dr. Kaindl is the author of two books and the editor of another one. He served as guest editor of a Special Issue on "Object-oriented Approaches in Artificial Intelligence and Human-Computer Interaction" in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies (IJHCS), and of a Special Section on "Symbolic Modeling in Practice" in the Communications of the ACM (CACM). He is (co-)author of more than 50 refereed journal and conference publications.

Selected Publications:

H. Kaindl. An integration of scenarios with their purposes in task modeling. In Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, & Techniques (DIS '95), Ann Arbor, MI, August 1995, 227-235.

H. Kaindl. How to identify binary relations for domain models. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-18), pages 28–36, Berlin, Germany, March 1996. IEEE.

H. Kaindl. A practical approach to combining requirements definition and object-oriented analysis. Annals of Software Engineering, 3:319–343, 1997.

H. Kaindl, S. Kramer, and R. Kacsich. A case study of decomposing functional requirements using scenarios. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Requirements Engineering (ICRE'98), Colorado Springs, CO, April 1998. IEEE.

H. Kaindl. Combining goals and functional requirements in a scenario-based design process. In People and Computers XIII, Proceedings of Human Computer Interaction '98 (HCI '98), pages 101–121, Sheffield, UK, September 1998. Springer.

M. Mannion, B. Keepence, H. Kaindl, and J. Wheadon. Reusing single system requirements from application family requirements. In Proceedings of the Twenty-first International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-21), Los Angeles, CA, May 1999.

Contact Details:

Principal Investigator: Dr. Hermann Kaindl

Address: Siemens AG Austria, Geusaugasse 17, A-1030 Vienna, Austria

Telephone number: +43 51707 43288

Telefax number: +43 51707 53270

EMail: hermann.kaindl@siemens.at

List of Members