Research Interests

My research area is systems requirements engineering. I am developing techniques for modelling and analyzing the needs that motivate the creation or modification of software intensive systems, and the relationships between these needs and the precise specification of software requirements and software architectural designs.

I am currently working on the following topics:

• the precise modelling and reasoning about non-functional goals, and the impact of alternative system and software designs on such needs ([Letier04])
• the development of specialised models and techniques supporting decision-making during requirements engineering and software design, both at the product and process levels
• the modelling and formal analysis of behaviour models using goals, scenarios, and state machines, and the derivation of software architecture behaviour models from goal-oriented requirements models (e.g. [Letier02, Letier05a, Letier05b])

All these topics are concerned with the complex, intertwined relationships that exist between requirements engineering and software design, approaching them from different perspectives using a diverse range of mathematical and logical techniques (state machines and temporal logics, probabilistic models, multi-criteria decision making techniques).  The development of an integrated framework for requirements engineering and software design using the appropriate combination of core techniques, and making them accessible to practitioners, is the main objective that motivates these efforts.

Education and Previous Employment

I received a Phd in Software Engineering from the University of Louvain in Belgium. My Phd thesis, carried out under the supervision of Axel van Lamsweerde, presents a set of techniques for elaborating and reasoning about goal models. Previously, I received an Engineering degree in Applied Mathematics, and a Bachelor degree in Philosophy from the same university.

After my Phd, I was awarded several grants from the FNRS, the Belgian national research fund, to work as a postdoctoral researcher and scientific collaborator, still at the computer science department of the University of Louvain. During that period, I stayed several months at Imperial College, working with Jeff Kramer, Jeff Magee, and Sebastian Uchitel on the integration of goal-oriented requirements engineering method and software architecture analysis using event-based transition systems. I joined UCL as a lecturer in October 2006.