Technion

Institute Name: Technion, Israel Institute of Technology

Description: The Technion is Israel's oldest university, founded in 1924, and its the only institute of higher learning devoted fully to the education of engineers, architects, scientists, and physicians. It has 7,850 undergraduate and 2,650 graduates students in its 19 academic departments.

The Faculty of Computer Science established following a relevant graduate program administered by an interdisciplinary committee, in 1969. Undergraduate studies started in 1970, and since then the department has grown steadily. In 1974, an undergraduate program in Computer Engineering was implemented jointly with the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. Another program, with Information Systems, was established in 1983 joinly with the Faculty of Industrial Engineering and Management, for the graduation of systems analysts. The Faculty is one of the fastest growing academic units of the Technion. having 45 faculty members, 73 teaching assistants, a varying number of adjunct lecturers, 800 undergraduate students and 130 graduate students. Several laboratories are operated by the Faculty, providing experimental facilities to both faculty members and students.

The research areas of the Faculty include: artificial intelligence, algorithms (deterministic, distributed, probabilistic, randomized), coding theory (error correction, source coding), combinatorial optimization, compilation theory, complexity theory, computational geometry, computational linguistics, computer architecture and VLSI, computer graphics, computer networks and protocols, computer vision, cryptography, database systems, data structures, document processing and electronic publishing, image processing, logic and logic programming, modelling and performance evaluation, neural networks, numerical analysis, parallel and distributed computation, programming languages, operating systems, robotics, semantics and program verification, and software engineering.

The Faculty's research in requirements engineering is conducted solely by a single faculty member, namely Prof. Daniel M. Berry with the assistance of his students. The work that has been done by Prof. Berry and his students include:

• A study by Berry of the dynamics of the requirements engineering process showed the importance of having people both expert in and ignorant of the problem domain of the system under specification. The ignorant people are needed to ask all the so-called stupid questions that expose the experts' tacit assumptions, and the experts are needed to answer these questions.
• The Ph.D. thesis completed by the recently graduated Dr. Leah Goldin, now visiting City University, London, studies a prototype tool for abstraction identification in requirements elicitation. The research was carried out in cooperation with the Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), one of Israel's largest defense contractors. In an IAI-supplied case study, Goldin, an application-ignorant requirement engineer, using the tool proved more effective than three application-expert requirements analysts at IAI in identifying abstractions in the case study.
• A study by Berry together with Karin Breitman, a visitor to the Technion from the Ponitifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, began to look at the problems of engineering the requirements for multimedia hypermedia applications. The study observed a lot of similarity in the processes of devising requirements for an arbitrary specific software-based system and for multimedia hypermedia about an arbitrary specific subject.
• Research by Alon Ravid, a Technion student, explored User interface prototyping as a requirements elicitation technique. A user interface prototype is built during the requirements engineering phases of a software system development project. Along with the user interface prototype are produced various documents such as the system requirement specification and an occupation analysis document. When a user interface prototype and other documents exist, they may not describe the same functionality, particulary because there may be behavior of the user interface prototype, artifacts of prototyping, that may not be intended. The problem is that in later development stages, when there is a user interface prototype and other documents, it is often difficult to reconcile the difference between the user interface prototype and the other documents. This research has found an approach for avoiding this difficulty. The approach has been demonstrated effective by applying it to parts of a real software development.

Prof. Daniel M. Berry, Technion

Dr. Leah Goldin, Comverse, Ltd.

Mr. Alon Ravid, Technion

Ms. Karin Breitman, PUC Rio de Janeiro

Brief CVs of Key Researchers:

Name: Prof. Daniel M. Berry

Nationality: Israel & U.S.A.

Academic Qualifications & Experience: Daniel M. Berry holds a PhD. in Computer Science (Brown University,1974). He has been a faculty member of the Computer Science Department at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA from 1973 until 1987. In 1987, he joined the Computer Science Faculty at the Technion, Israel, where he has been ever since. From 1990 until 1994, he worked at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, USA, where he participated the group that built CMU's Master of Software Engineering program. He visited the Computer Systems Group at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada for the 1998-1999 academic year. His research interests are software engineering in general, and document processing and requirements engineering in particular.

At the Technion, Prof. Berry teaches the upper division Software Engineering course, supervises the requirements engineering and the design parts of the full year software engineering capstone project, and gives graduate seminars in Electronic Publishing and Requirements Engineering. He supervises MSc and PhD students in these areas.

Prof. Berry also consults the local industry, doing requirement elicitation and analysis, teaching modern software development methods, and carrying out inspections.

Selected Publications:

Berry, D.M. and Berry, O.(1983): ``The Programmer-Client Interaction in Arriving at Program Specifications: Guidelines and Linguistic Requirements,'' Proceedings of IFIP TC2 Working Conference on System Description Methodologies, E. Knuth (Ed.), Kecskemet, Hungary

Maarek, Y.S. and Berry, D.M.(1989): ``The Use of Lexical Affinities in Requirements Extraction,'' Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Software Specification and Design, Pittsburgh, PA

Aguilera, C. and Berry, D.M.(1991): ``The Use of a Repeated Phrase Finder in Requirements Extraction,'' Journal of Systems and Software, 13:3, pp. 209-230

Maarek, Y., Berry, D.M., and Kaiser, G.E.(1991): ``An Information Retrieval Approach For Automatically Constructing Software Libraries,'' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 17:8, pp. 800-813

Lor, K.-W.E. and Berry, D.M. (1991): ``Automatic Synthesis of SARA Design Models from System Requirements,'' IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 17:12, pp. 1229-1239

Berry, D.M. (1995): ``The Importance of Ignorance in Requirements Engineering'', Journal of Systems and Software, 28:1, pp. 179-184

Goldin, L. and Berry, D.M.(1997): ``AbstFinder, A Prototype Natural Language Text Abstraction Finder for Use in Requirements Elicitation'' Automated Software Engineering, 4:4, pp. 375-412

Berry, D.M. (1999) ``Software and House Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned in Combatting Requirements Creep'', Requirements Engineering Journal (to appear)

Contact Details:

Principal Investigator: Prof. Daniel M. Berry

Address: Faculty of Computer Science, Technion, Haifa, 32000, ISRAEL

Telephone number: +972 4 829 4325 (but does not hear over the phone, so please use e-mail or telefax only)

Telefax number: + 972 4 822 1128 or + 972 4 829 4353

EMail: dberry@cs.technion.ac.il

List of Members