Industry Day

Opening

Session 1: Keynote
Session Chair: TBA

Business Analysis Agility: How business analysis works with agile development

Suzanne Robertson (Atlantic Systems Guild, UK)

Abstract — Business analysts are just as indispensable as they always have been, but now we need to work differently, in a more agile way, to fit with agile development. This talk shows you how to do that. It is about three things:
> Too many projects start with an assumed solution, often by recording this assumed solution as a backlog. This talk shows you a better way to start.
> Spend enough time with the customers to understand their work, their desired outcome, and what it is they value. We talk about generating alternative candidate solutions and testing them using quick, safe-to-fail probes. The justification for multiple candidates is to get away from the assumed solution, and validate the customer’s problem space by exploring different ways to solve it.
> Use a story map to organise the stories written by the business analysts. The BAs write the stories in units corresponding to business events. The product owner prioritises the story map (which is in effect prioritising the business events) and thereby synchronises the work of the business analysts with that of the developers.
 

Session 2: Invited Talks
Session Chair: TBA

On the way to trustworthy highly-automated CPS — Some thoughts on safety and security requirements in the age of autonomous systems and machine learning

Thorsten Weyer (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Abstract — In the traditional view coined by Edward A. Lee, a cyber-physical system (CPS) consists of embedded systems which are interconnected by a technical network. Nowadays, CPS are no longer restricted to fixed (invariant) connections with other systems throughout their life cycle. Today, and even more in the future, such systems are able to dynamically form cooperating or collaborating groups in order to fulfil their mission in the best possible way. CPS with these capabilities are the technological foundation for many of our future scenarios, like in autonomous transportation, Industry 4.0, smart medical devices, and smart energy networks. In these scenarios, CPS typically need to operate autonomously to a great extent but not necessarily in all operational situations — viz., they are “highly automated”. Whether highly-automated CPS actually meet with broad acceptance will largely depend on whether we as humans can build trust in such systems. A core aspect for building trustworthy highly-automated systems is to guarantee safety and security in operation, even in the case of unforeseeable situations in the operational environment.
    Using examples from the autonomous driving field, this talk examines overall challenges in the requirements engineering field to lay the foundation for safe and secure highly-automated CPS in dynamic and collaborative environments. From the perspective of requirements engineering, the talk also demonstrates how techniques from the areas of self-adaptive systems, collaborative systems and machine learning can be used to engineer trustworthy highly-automated CPS.
 

Designing adaptive digital ecosystems
Ian Thomas (Fujitsu RunMyProcess, UK)

Abstract — In our increasingly complex and hyperconnected world, digital ecosystems are coming to the forefront as the business model of the future. Instead of building and accumulating internal assets and expertise organizations can now be far more nimble, experimental and capital-efficient by connecting ecosystems of people, information and infrastructure that already exist. Pioneered by companies such as Uber or Airbnb, such ecosystems enable companies to co-create value beyond traditional enterprise boundaries and continuously evolve their services in partnership with external collaborators and customers.
    Creating such ecosystems requires new approaches to building shared understanding, however, with a need to drive collective situational awareness in complex, dynamic and constantly evolving environments. Building shared goals and systems in this environment therefore requires a far more collaborative and evolutionary approach to requirements engineering and goal-setting. In this talk we will discuss the nature of these new ecosystems together with powerful emerging techniques for building and evolving the shared situational awareness necessary to succeed.
 

Break

Session 3: Invited Talks
Session Chair: TBA

An aligned agile approach for strategy and portfolio management
Rainer Grau (pragmatic solutions, Switzerland) and Vania Bosshart (Die Mobiliar, Switzerland)

Abstract — In 2016, Die Mobiliar transformed parts of the development organization towards the scaled agile framework SAFe. Within the last three years, Die Mobiliar optimized the agile way of working by adapting SAFe toward the needs of the organization. An important step of this adoption is the consistent alignment from strategy towards a lean portfolio. The agile framework SAFe does not include this bridge between strategy and a lean portfolio.
Die Mobiliar decided to rely on agile principles to design an approach to build this bridge. A core principle of agile organization is to work with capabilities and objectives. The Mobiliar approach is based on these principles. The definition of business capabilities enables Die Mobiliar to address the need of customers and the organization. The definition of objectives how these capabilities shall evolve over time, derived from strategy and vision, represent the desired change. With decomposition of these objectives, the strategic roadmap and finally the change portfolio are driven.
    This talk dives into details of this approach for a consistent alignment of strategy with an agile change organization. It gives insights into many agile and classic aspects like strategy, agile, business architecture, SAFe@Mobiliar, requirements engineering and many more to drive a large organization, including experiences and impediments on the move.
 

Digital Design — Thinking beyond Requirements Engineering

Kim Lauenroth (adesso, Germany)

Abstract — The possibilities of digital technology enable innovative services and all-new business models and thus lead to comprehensive and disruptive changes in the economy and society. Digital transformation is an umbrella term for this development.
    Previously, analytical skills were particularly important in order to understand existing systems, companies and business processes. This understanding was the prerequisite to support and improve them with the help of digital technologies. Digital transformation is different because there is no reference point for analysis. We therefore need new ways pf working. The growing popularity of Design Thinking was the first sign of this development.
    Due to the increasing technical possibilities (e.g. artificial intelligence, blockchain...) we have to complement our analysis focus with a design focus. New roles and methods are far from sufficient to meet these challenges. We need an entirely new profession: Digital Design. The vision of digital design is to enable people to proactively design innovative digital solutions together with our stakeholders and under consideration of the new technical possibilities.

    This talk gives an introduction to digital design and discusses implication of digital design for requirements engineering practice and research.
 

Break

Session 4: Experience Reports
Session Chair: TBA

Agile requires IoT in our minds
Sara Bertone (Zurich Insurance, Switzerland)

Abstract — How often does it happen that requirements go back and forth between stakeholders and the development team because the context or the goals are not clear? I guess very often. When implementing agile methodology, there is a tendency to delegate the analysis of the big picture, drawing the red line or simply connecting the dots to the scrum team. But the main reason why we decided to work agile is to prevent high failures, identify potential risks and their consequences as soon as possible. So what if we start asking the stakeholders placing requirements to start engineering upfront? Are we using agile work more in a vertical perspective rather than as E2E value chain?
    In this experience report, I want to highlight the possibilities we have to increase the quality and therefore the speed of the implementation of the requirements — if we re-focus the essential part of agile working along the process, by the start of everything, where needs and problems actually arise. I will also identify some causes for this behavior, like working and looking only at the backlog, ignoring, for example, story mapping, business context and so on.
 

Requirements engineering for the "smart" AI world: the digital realm of Digital Twins and contextual business applications
Ethan Hadar (Accenture Labs, Israel)

Abstract — Digital Twins are the key to unlocking the future of fully integrated digital businesses and ecosystems across synergetic business processes with interlaced contexts and relevant AI analytics. These multi-context Digital Twins maintain the understanding of temporal situations (state, ad-hoc, historical and current) over separate domains, as well as predict and simulate outcomes. In AI, the quality of classification depends on the nature of labeling and quality of the training data. Yet in such digital twins, the context that is captured as relations between collected entities, is as important. Such contextual business applications require contextual (graph-model) requirements capturing. Even more so, since content vary in time, training the AI should include the ability to maintain the context, i.e., the discovered ontology. As the ontology expand, labeling of data elements should change as well. Namely, modeling digital twin instances and the ontology used in the model should be part of the requirements definition. Categories, labeling, and the ontology captured as knowledge graphs, as well as linkage to the captured data should all be part of the requirements modeling as early as possible in the development cycle, and not part of the system construction or AI training.
 

Session 5: Wrap-Up
Session Chair: TBA

Plenary discussion with all speakers

Closing

Reception at Zunfthaus zur Meisen (if we can hold the Industry Day physically)