A picture of me

Emmanuel Letier

Associate Professor
Software Systems Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
University College of London

Email: e.letier@ucl.ac.uk
Office: UCL Engineering Front Building, Room 3.01

Book Draft

I am writing a book on Requirements Engineering for Software Engineers. It's a work in progress and the draft is available by following the previous link. Feedback and encouragements are highly appreciated.

Research

My research is about software requirements and architecture. I study how to discover, analyse, and communicate the requirements and architecture for complex software systems.

The main theme of my research is that understanding stakeholder goals is fundamental for building the right software, one that one that fulfills its intended purposes and delights its users.

Understanding stakeholder goals and defining them precisely (e.g. in the form of mathematical objective functions, fitness functions, or reward functions) is one of the most critical aspects of building AI-based systems.

Stakeholder goals can be analysed using a combination of natural language, formal logic, and mathematical models. The logic and mathematical models, which are hidden from stakeholders, serve to amplify our natural communication and reasoning capabilities. This is achieved with powerful tools for model checking, model synthesis, multi-objective optimisation, and Bayesian statistical analysis.

Analysing stakeholder goals includes analysing tradeoffs between conflicting goals, anticipating obstacles to goal satisfaction, and dealing with uncertainty about the impacts of design choices on these goals. Uncertainty is also important in strategic release planning, software testing and debugging, software evolution, and the management of technical debt.

The goal of my research is to devise sound and practical techniques for the iterative generation, testing, debugging, and optimization of software requirements, architecture, and code. Ultimately, these techniques aim to facilitate the development of software systems that are more dependable, secure, user-friendly, maintainable, and beneficial to everyone impacted by them.

Selected publications

On uncertainty in strategic release planning

On analysing uncertainty in goal models

On analysing obstacles to goal satisfaction

On managing requirements conflicts

On deriving software requirements from stakeholder goals and domain assumptions

On inferring requirements from scenarios

Teaching

I teach a course on software requirements and architecture to MSc students at UCL and supervise students projects in collaboration with industry.

I am writing an online book based on my requirements engineering lectures. You can read the current draft of the book here: Requirements Engineering for Software Engineers.

Short bio

I joined UCL as a lecturer in 2006. I hold a PhD in Software Engineering from the University of Louvain in Belgium. Prior to my doctoral studies, I obtained an engineering degree in Applied Mathematics and a bachelor degree in Philosophy from the same university.

I served as Program Co-Chair of the International Requirements Engineering Conference in 2016. I am regularly involved in program committees for various conferences, notably for the International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) and the International Conference in Software Engineering (ICSE). I chaired the BCS Requirements Engineering Specialist Group from 2011 to 2017 and served as head of UCL Software Systems Engineering research group from 2017 to 2020.

Publications

Also on: Google Scholar, DBLP

Contact:
Emmanuel Letier
Department of Computer Science
University College London
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom
Email: e.letier@ucl.ac.uk