This article discusses the difficulties that arose when attempting to specify and design a large scale digital learning environment for Scottish schools. This had a potential user base of about 1 million users and was intended to replace an existing,
under-used system. We found that the potential system users were not interested in engaging with the project and that there were immense problems with system governance. The only technique that we found to be useful were user stories, presenting scenarios of how the system might be used by students and their teachers. The designed architecture was based around a layered set of replaceable services.
In this paper, we discuss an approach to system requirements engineering, which is based on using models of the responsibilities assigned to agents in a multi-agency system of systems. The responsibility models serve as a basis for identifying the st
akeholders that should be considered in establishing the requirements and provide a basis for a structured approach, described here, for information requirements elicitation. We illustrate this approach using a case study drawn from civil emergency management.
This short papers discusses the issues of teaching cloud computing from a software engineering rather than a business perspective. It discusses what topics might be covered in a senior course on cloud software engineering.
This paper explores the issues around the construction of large-scale complex systems which are built as systems of systems and suggests that there are fundamental reasons, derived from the inherent complexity in these systems, why our current softwa
re engineering methods and techniques cannot be scaled up to cope with the engineering challenges of constructing such systems. It then goes on to propose a research and education agenda for software engineering that identifies the major challenges and issues in the development of large-scale complex, software-intensive systems. Central to this is the notion that we cannot separate software from the socio-technical environment in which it is used.
