RE Cares about giving back to society: Employing RE techniques and hackathon for Alberta

Co-located with RE 2018

Requirements engineering (RE) is a sub discipline of Software engineering, which is concerned with defining, documenting, and maintaining requirements (which describe what a software system is to accomplish) in the engineering design process. RE is the bridge between users and software development teams. RE Cares is the initiative, along with the 2018 Requirements Engineering conference, intended to help society by adopting the latest software engineering research and practice as applied to important societal problems. In other words, RE Cares is a new undertaking to apply our RE expertise and beyond to social issues and/or philanthropic undertakings in order to show we care and to "do good."

RE Cares is designed to elicit requirements from multiple stakeholders (see appendix for stakeholder bios, we currently have a representative from Mutual Aid Alberta, a developer from Mutual Aid Alberta, a firefighter, and a government representative. We will hear the story of Mutual Aid Alberta, their previous and current challenges, and the current app that they request: a secure, private, instant messaging system that will run on their emergency portal, permitting emergency personnel from diverse provinces and locations to communicate in an integrated fashion. During the session, participants will raise questions in order to understand the different needs represented by the stakeholders. Then the participants will discuss requirements that were gathered ahead of time for the instant messaging app as well as continue to gather requirements from the stakeholders. Three techniques have been selected for use at RE Cares. Participants will apply their expertise in assisting with these three techniques (see below in proposal) to build specifications, to develop initial design, and to prototype a few features.

RE Cares brief abstract

RE Cares is a series of RE sessions and hackathon to work with real stakeholders to elicit and specify requirements, as well as to develop an initial design and prototype early features for a secure, private, instant messaging app to be used by emergency management personnel in Alberta, Canada.

All RE participants are welcome to join RE Cares. We particularly encourage students to join us. Check back here as we start to post early requirements and domain descriptions.

The tentative agenda of the event is as follows:

RE Cares session 1 (Tuesday full-day workshop) – Meet stakeholders, teach them about requirements; in the afternoon the organizers will teach each other new techniques for session 2

At one of the plenary sessions of the RE conference, RE Cares will be advertised

RE Cares session 2 (preferably Wednesday afternoon after the advertisement of RE Cares):

- Introducing RE Cares and its goals and RE Cares agenda

- Listening to stakeholders making a 15 – 20 minute presentation about their needs

- Familiarizing the RE participants and defining teams for various tasks (this means letting participants join one of the two techniques teams listed above)

- Performing the techniques under “RE Technologies to be Applied” listed above

RE Cares session 3 (preferably Thursday, 90 minute RE session, followed by 2.5 hours in informal space):

- Having teams make a presentation on the elicited requirements, sub stories, and epic, etc. from session 2

- Having teams and stakeholders work on prioritizing, evaluating requirements

- Having teams begin to prototype features

- Having stakeholders give feedback on the prototypes

- Having all participants give feedback on RE Cares process (see evaluation plan)

- Explaining the “path forward to continued development of the app”

RE Cares is organized by:

· Jane Hayes, University of Kentucky

· Maleknaz Nayebi, University of Toronto

· Alex Dekhtyar, California Polytechnical University San Luis Obispo

· Barbara Paech, Heidelberg University

· Didar Zowghi, University of Technology Sydney

· Jane Cleland-Huang, Notre Dame University (advisory capacity)

· Shell Clarke, Mutual Aid Alberta (Stakeholder), see bio below

· Chuck Brophy, stakeholder (developer of Mutual Aid Alberta emergency management portal on which instant messaging app will run), see bio below

Along with:

· Jennifer Horkoff, Chalmers

· Alessio Ferrari, ISTI-CNR, Italy

· Sarah Gregory, Intel

· Matt Primrose, Intel

· Irit Hadar, Haifa

· Meira Levy, Shenkar along with students from Shenkar*

· Hackathon developers (from University of Kentucky: *Jared Payne, Erin Combs (still tentative), *Satrio Husodo (still tentative)) - * denotes students

Stakeholder bios

Shell Clarke, Mutual Aid Alberta

When human beings experience trauma or severe life stressors, it is not uncommon for their lives to unravel. Shell’s great passion is bringing stability to people who are involved in the trauma of an emergency. He helps clients, those impacted by an emergency, often includes children, adults and families, to find steadiness among chaos. Emergency management was a part of Shell’s life from a young child as he grew up in a home with one of Alberta Forest Services great Fire Bosses (Incident Commanders). Shell graduated with magna cum laude from both business management and electronic engineering from Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and holds a journeyman instrumentation ticket. He has over 36 years’ experience in the energy industry and has spent the last 20 years specializing in Emergency Management. He has trained over 1000 responders in ICS, Emergency Management and Response. Shell is a co-founder of Mutual Aid Alberta where for the past 10 years sits as chair. He also CEO and President of Learned Response Group an emergency management company for the past 15 years. Learned Response Group has helped several Energy Companies exceed regulatory compliance in emergency management. Most important of all Shell is married to his best friend Susan and between the two of them raised 5 children where crisis management was a daily event. They are now blessed with 9 perfect grandchildren.

Chuck Brophy, Celsus Management, Inc.

Chuck Brophy, Bsc.EE, P. Eng., CISM is a seasoned Professional Engineer, entrepreneur, businessman, and systems architect. Of course we all know what ‘seasoned’ means. Fortunately, Chuck’s 40+ years of professional experience is actually 40+ years, not one year 40+ times. And the plus is a secret. In those years, Chuck has designed, built and operated oil and gas fields, facilities, and pipelines thanks to a post graduate stint at Amoco’s famed gas plant processing school. He has pioneered many technologies including building the first operational SCADA system in Western Canada, and engineering many of the basic tools and interfaces used in real-time and process control systems, utilities, and modern telecommunications. In his days as a real-time systems engineer for Hewlett-Packard, Chuck was the factory technical representative for HP’s real time systems across Canada and NW United States. From there his hardware and software adventures have built a group of software companies ranging from large scale GIS systems to web database design to data management. In the course of those adventures, Chuck attained certification as an Information Security Manager, and has conducted hundreds or more IT security designs, reviews and audits in field and corporate locations across a wide range of industries. You would think that with all that software and hardware experience, Chuck would implicitly trust the world of technology. Not so. He has also developed a consulting practice in the areas of risk management, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Ever the entrepreneur, Chuck constantly seeks new opportunities in hydrocarbon innovation, software development, and management consulting. His latest game-changing ventures include production of high power, zero carbon fuel directly from natural gas, and development of ‘right here / right now’ data management technology for emergency response.

Please contact Jane Hayes at hayes –at-cs.uky.edu for more information