Respecify: Writing better requirements

Requirements authoring is a difficult and time-consuming task that requires the right combination of technical, commercial, risk management and writing skills. Most specifications are written free-form in a word processor because this is easy and familiar to the authors.  The authors are usually domain experts rather that requirements authoring experts. The result is that most specifications we see are of poor quality. Many of our engagements are to fix, or re-specify, the requirements written by others. Over the years, we have found that there are patterns or templates that help structure thinking when writing requirements. We have developed Respecify, a web-based-requirement authoring tool that uses constrained English to guide the author through the requirements writing process. Respecify helps ensure that all terms used in the specification are defined and consistently used; it extracts the list of all referenced documents; and it automatically derives the system hierarchy, functions, and interfaces making requirements defects more apparent. This presentation will be a demonstration of Respecify.

Stephen Boyd is the Managing Director of Ricardo Rail Australia. He has over 20 years’ design, manufacturing, commissioning and maintenance experience across the largest rail projects. He is Managing Director of Ricardo Rail Australia & NZ and runs a team of over 115 technical staff. Over the past few years Stephen has authored many requirements for the major rolling stock, metro and light rail projects in Australia and NZ. Stephen is currently working on specifications for the Sydney Metro West project.

Using Systems Engineering to manage complexity – Amsterdam Metro case study

The Amsterdam Metro is a rapid transit system serving Amsterdam, Netherlands and extending to the surrounding municipalities of Diemen and Ouder-Amstel. The metro system consists of five routes and serves 39 stations, with a total length of 42.7 kilometres. In 2002 the construction of the Noord/Zuidlijn (North–South line) was started. The new metro line is the first to serve the Amsterdam North district, via a tunnel under the IJ. From there, it runs via Amsterdam Centraal to Amsterdam Zuid, which is planned to become the second biggest transport hub in the city, after Amsterdam Centraal. The line includes a mixture of bored tunnels and immersed tunnels under the IJ. The new North-South line is 9 kilometres km in length with 7 kilometres underground in a bore tunnel with seven new stations. The scope included the introduction of a new Traffic Management System, Data network and central control systems for stations, which was also integrated into the existing brownfield. The project has a rocky road to implementation. During the integration phase, the project relied heavily on the systems engineering and integration process in order to commission and handover the systems into operations and maintenance, which is the subject of this presentation. Thijs van Steen will talk about the challenges faced in implementing systems engineering, lessons learnt as well as the legacy the project left the operator and maintainers.

Thijs van Steen is the Director of Systems Integrator, Digital Systems Program, TfNSW. He has recently moved to Sydney and is now working on the Digital Systems Program as the Director of Systems Integration. Prior to this was responsible for Systems Integration in the new Noord/Zuidlijn (North–South line) in Amsterdam as part of Metro en Tram, gemeente Amsterdam.

(This is an EA event hosted by the Systems Engineering Society of Australia)

Click on the link below to register