PERE: Evaluation and Improvement of Dependable Processes

In the development of systems that have to be dependable, weaknesses in the requirements engineering (RE) process are highly undesirable. Such weaknesses may either introduce undetected system weaknesses, or otherwise significant costs may arise in their correction later in the development process. Typically, the RE process contains a number of individual and group activities and thus is particularly subject to weaknesses arising from human factors. Our work has concerned the development of PERE (Process Evaluation in Requirements Engineering), which is a structured method for analysing processes for weaknesses and proposing process improvements against them. PERE combines two complementary viewpoints within its process evaluation approach. Firstly, a classical engineering analysis is used for process modelling and generic process weakness identification. This initial analysis is fed into the second analysis phase, in which those process components that are primarily composed of human activity, their interconnections and organisational context are subject to a systematic human factors analysis. In this paper we briefly describe PERE and provide examples of the application experience to date.