There is no question that a transformation is taking place in product development: New technologies are making new products possible, and are changing the way how we think about existing products, like cars. But what are the trends driving this transformation? This article outlines six trends, based

Dealing with change is getting increasingly difficult, as change in general accelerates. Therefore, we need new paradigms for dealing with change. This article outlines the idea of building a library of patterns for managing change in product development. Many organizations have established processes for managing change, and

ReqIF, the Requirements Interchange Format, is arguably the accepted format for exchanging requirements. Every serious requirements tool supports it, and ReqIF.academy has over 3000 members, demonstrating the ongoing interest in ReqIF. Yet, the press has been silent. It seems that there were few news on ReqIF. In

This week, I was attending ASEC 2018 in the UK on behalf of Jama Software. This is the main conference of the UK Chapter of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE). Andy Howells was providing insights on how Changan is transforming their product development with MBSE.

The numbers speak for themselves: There will be 1 trillion connected devices by 2035, but less than 4% of new devices include embedded security. Keep in mind that years, or decades will pass, until today’s embedded devices will be decommissioned. This is a Tsunami in the making,

More and more products are connected, and are therefore part of the Internet of Things (IoT). But IoT development is fundamentally different from the development of more traditional products. This is a challenge for new companies that enter the market, but established organizations struggle even more, as their

Putting information on a single page can be incredible useful if done right. While the trend is towards modeling, we argued before that documents still have their place. A one-pager is compelling, as there really is no excuse to read it. Unless you are using 3 Point

There are many techniques that help dealing with today’s increasing product complexity. In the following, we describe the black box paradigm, and 3 ways for applying it. While you hopefully have an overarching strategy for coping with product complexity, individual techniques can be applied quickly for harvesting

Connecting cars promises many benefits, from saving time (rerouting around traffic jams and towards parking spaces), money (driving in platoon) and providing safety (warning of road hazards ahead of time). Of course, there are also risks, in particularly with respect to safety, due to bugs or malicious

Until not too long ago, only few companies employed Systems Engineers. In fact, until recently, there was not even a clear career path to become one. Things are changing on both fronts: The demand for Systems Engineers is going up steadily. And there are now systematic career

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a hot buzzword right now. It simply states that we take physical devices and connect them to the Internet. As with many buzz words, this is not really new: This has been done for decades. But in the past, this was

The Gartner hype cycle is a model for representing the maturity, adoption and social application of technology. It consists of five phases, starting with a Technology Trigger and ending with the Plateau of Productivity. Gartner looks at emerging technologies on a regular basis and places them on

On April 26th, Michael Jastram will participate in a panel discussion with Colin Hood and Christer Fröling. The webinar is entitled Disrupting Requirements: Finding a Better Way (Free Registration >>). The subject of the debate is textual requirements. Requirements are more important than ever, but what works

ReConf 2018 is coming up, taking place on March 6 and 7 2018 in Munich. ReConf is one of the biggest conferences on Requirements Engineering in Europe. Dr. Michael Jastram will be present with two talks: “Agile Systems Modeling: Contradiction in Terms?” and “Functional Safety and Agile,

Neil Maiden is Professor of Digital Creativity in the Faculty of Management at the Cass Business School, and co-founder of the Centre for Creativity in Professional Practice at City, University of London. He initiates and leads interdisciplinary research in software engineering, creativity science and integrated health and

System models are powerful tools that allow improving many aspects of Systems Engineering, from traceability, change management to test case generation. But there is also a dark side: Modeling can become an end in itself, without a clear definition of a goal for the model. Chaotic, hard

E-Learning has been all the rage lately, and – let’s be honest – we’ve done our part with the launch of ReqIF.academy. We took all our knowledge of ReqIF and started to put it on-line, mostly free. And this is great for those who need this knowledge,

Today’s guest article has been written by Carsten Pitz, who shares his insights about the state of Papyrus for modeling, which is likely to be interest to our readers. In particular, as an Eclipse based tool, Papyrus can be integrated with ReqIF Studio. Nevertheless, Papyrus has the

Paul Schreinemakers has over 25 years experience in product development in various domains. Paul started his career as a mechanical engineer with SRON, the Netherlands Institute for Space Research. During his 10 years at SRON he learned to apply Systems Engineering. Than Paul moved to Thales, being

This is just a quick announcement for an upcoming event. We’d like to let you know that a face-to-face ReqIF workshop (English) will take place on April 28, 2017. You have the chance to get all your ReqIF questions answered and to dive deep into the subject

Some readers of this blog may already have discovered a new website that we silently launched: In September, we made ReqIF.academy available to the public. Face-to-Face ReqIF Training for German Speakers For German speaking readers, we are organizing a one-day ReqIF training on October 28 in Nuremberg,

For decades, requirements have been written primarily using natural language. There are many good reasons for this, as we already explained in this series. Modeling requirements has been used in the past as well, but not in a standardized manner. Modeling in the Old Days Before systems

After laying the foundation for requirements modeling during the last three articles, we will finally look at actual requirements, and how to model them. In particular, this article discusses textual requirements. At a later point, we’ll look at non-textual requirements (e.g. use case modeling). Templates: Requirements Modeling

In the last two articles of this series, we learned what requirements modeling is in the first place, and why it is a good idea (if done right). We also learned that there is nothing magical about modeling, on the contrary: You may already do requirements modeling

This is the second part of the mini-series “requirements modeling”. In this article, we create a common understanding on what modeling is in general, and a requirements model in particular. Models in General Models are used everywhere in life, not just for systems and requirements. It is

Requirements are usually captured in natural language. This is fine for small project and no special training is needed to read the requirements. But there are advantages to modeling requirements. Before we discuss why modeling requirements is a good idea, we need to figure out and understand

Papyrus is an open source modeling tool that is part of the Eclipse Ecosystem. Those working with Eclipse or those looking for a platform solution may want to have a close look at it. And so did we. However, our experience with Papyrus in the past was

Modeling has been a hot topic for many years, with UML being one of the most popular ones. Models have many advantages: They provide structure, remove redundancies, and allow fancy things to be done with the model, even the generation of tests or code. We also sometimes

ReConf 2016, arguably the most important conference on requirements in Germany, will take place next week in Munich. If you are concerned with ReqIF or requirements engineering, read on to learn about the talks and events that you should not miss. Of course, Formal Mind is active

We announced a number of new features in ReqIF Studio right before Christmas, including better SpecRelations (linking), Validation, ID-Generation and a few more. But we did not stop there, but continued our work. Read on to learn what we added. But first… Talk at ReConf 2016 Dr.

Over the last two months, we put a lot of work into ReqIF Studio: We polished the rough edges and we implemented new features. Maybe you already noticed these, as we rolled some of them out silently, like jumping to the target of links. Others we already

Update: SE-Trends is now a huge success in Germany. It has been running for over two years now, accumulating over 100 articles. There are also many discussions taking place. Therefore, we invite you to either have a look (if you speak German), or to visit it via

The first exchange of requirements using the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) can be frustrating: There are many tools out there, and there are still some interoperability issues.  If a tool refuses to process a ReqIF file, where lies the problem? To answer this question, we developed a

The Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) is used to exchange requirements – as the name suggests. But most of the time, you would do more than just one exchange, and if you do this, you may want to know what actually changed between two versions. This is not

In letzter Zeit wird wieder viel von ReqIF geredet.  Hervorheben möchten wir unter anderem die folgenden zwei Artikel: ReqIF – Standard für den automatisierten Austausch von Anforderungen – Dieser Artikel gibt einen sehr schönen Überblick über den ReqIF-Zustand, zur Abwechslung mal auf Deutsch.  Dort wird auch auf

ReConf is the largest conference on requirements engineering in Europe. Of course, Formal Mind was present, both with a talk and as an exhibitor.  We have already posted a retrospective. At the same time we supervised a group of students who were participating in the Entrepreneurship Lab

Für die Leser, die Deutsch sprechen und nächsten Montag in der Nähe von Bond sind, könnte die folgende Veranstaltung interessant sein: Michael Jastram wird beim Eclipse DemoCamp den Vortrag “Systementwicklung mit Eclipse in der Lehre” halten. Details hier >> Teilnehmer erhalten ein kostenloses Exemplar vom formalmind Studio

When the ReqIF standard was created, it was called RIF.  Only when the OMG took over the standard, it was renamed: Unfortunately, there was already an established standard called RIF, the W3C Rule Interchange Format. Today, both ReqIF and RIF exist and are in use.  Many tools

Thousands of users are using formalmind Studio on a regular basis, and we get a lot of positive feedback and words of encouragement.  But there is one thing that drives many users mad: If an attribute is large, then it is not shown as a whole, but

Guest post by Dr. Andrea Herrmann, who is Freelance Trainer and Consultant in IT Management. Her 19 years of work experience were an enriching mixture of practice and research: 7 years as consultant and project manager, 10 years in research and university teaching, up to two guest

Those familiar in the software and systems engineering domain are typically familiar with ISO/IEC 15288, a standard covering processes and life cycle stages. But it’s huge, and small organizations have a hard time to justify its adaptation, for good reasons. For those not familiar with the standard

Last week, ReConf 2015 took place in Munich – this conference is the biggest on requirements an Europe, and the place where the Who is Who of RE meets.  First impressions have already been posted. Formal Mind was present in two capacities.  First, we an exhibitor, sharing

Better Documentation A while ago, we migrated the user documentation of Eclipse RMF and formalmind Studio to a new publishing technology (Latex).  This allows us to publish the documentation at  the same time on the Web, as a PDF and as built-in tool documentation (Eclipse Help).  You

This is actually the 50th post to the Formal Mind blog. A reason to celebrate, but also a reason to reflect. The goal of this blog is to inform our readers on science in systems engineering.  Are we doing a good job? To find out, we created

Requirements require some effort to read and understand. But what if you could bring them to life? This is possible, and you can see this at this year’s ReConf at the science track on Monday, March 16 2015. Visit our booth us at ReConf 2015.  Please contact

As newspapers and TV stations get ready to publish their annual reviews and retrospectives of 2014, they are bound to forget to report the remarkable progress that has been made on the Eclipse Requirements Modeling Framework this year.  But no fear, we shall now remedy this. Below

We talked about Standards before. n n From Andrea: Standards sind jedoch besser als ihr Ruf. Insgesamt unterstützt mindestens ein halbes Dutzend IEEE-Standards das RE. Diese sind miteinander kompatibel und ergänzen einander. Betrachten wir als Beispiel den Standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 „Systems and software engineering — Life cycle

We haven’t written in a while, and, as a consequence, there is plenty of news that we would like to share. Axiom – ReqIF-based requirements exchange Don’t worry: We will still provide plenty of technical insights on requirements and Eclipse in this newsletter.  But we also want

We haven’t written in a while, and, as a consequence, there is plenty of news that we would like to share. Axiom – ReqIF-based requirements exchange Don’t worry: We will still provide plenty of technical insights on requirements and Eclipse in this newsletter.  But we also want

We just uploaded a new version of formalmind Studio on our servers.  If you are already using formalmind Studio, it should offer by itself to update, or check manually via Help | Check for Updates. So, what’s new? Beta Test of Exchange Component has started We just

ISO 26262 The Standards Jungle of Systems Engineering  

With the free formalmind Studio, it is finally possible to do professional requirements engineering, without having to invests thousands in a tool that offers far more than the typical user needs.  While we’re working on improving the documentation, getting started can be a challenge.  But fear not,

A while ago, we supported the EU project Deploy and produced a handbook for the Rodin platform, a tool for creating formal specifications using the Event-B method.  This book was a great success, but only available electronically (for free, licensed under a Creative Commons license). Due to

You may have noticed that a lot of time has passed since the last release or ProR, which was 0.9.0.  Be assured that we’ve been busy behind the scenes: The next release, 0.10.0, will comply with the Eclipse Release Process.  And this is a lot of work.

Working with Requirements should not be an isolated activity – they interact with many aspects of the development process: progress is tracked by checking how many requirements have been implemented; tests demonstrate that requirements are correctly implemented; elements of the system specification show how requirements will be

Half a year ago, we announced that a student, Said Salem, would work on creating a better reporting solution for ProR in the context of his master thesis.  The good news is: He completed his thesis and passed the exam.  The bad news: The resulting implementations did

The ProR tool already made an impact, both as the reference implementation of the ReqIF standard, and as an important puzzle piece for Eclipse-based Systems Engineering.  But we also know that there is still some work to be done, before ProR becomes fit for industrial use.  For

Another year has passed, and we would like to thank our customers and the users of our technologies for working with us. The holiday season is a good time for reflecting, and we are proud to see our motto – science for systems engineering – applied in

It’s quite impressive how safe cars, planes and trains are today.  Looking at this, it seems that we understand really well how to build reliable systems. This is in part due to safety standards.  When they are not followed, as it seems to have been the case

Today is Blog Action Day. It’s a day for spreading awareness of human rights, or the lack thereof, in the world.  As a corporation, we have to be concerned with being profitable.  Nevertheless, our roots are in academica, and our products are based on open source.  Thus,

The Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF) came a long way, ever since its inception in 2004, when members of the Herstellerinitiative Software (HIS), a trade association of five major car manufacturers, decided to commission the creation of a requirements exchange format.  Step by step, the standard became more

The RMF team is proud to announce the 0.8.0 version of RMF and ProR (Download) to spice up your summer.  The most visible improvements regards the handling of default values, which we will describe further below.  You can also import examples into your workspace via File |

We’ve all seen it: You need to write a spec, so you open Word, write some text, you copy a state diagram from Enterprise Architect, and eventually send it off as a PDF. Okay, things are slightly better now. In the Eclipse ecosystem, maybe you are using

ProR doesn’t yet support mature reporting features. Right now only a simple HTML-Version of a requirements document can be generated (you can access this via the print menu). A better visual representation of the requirements document has been requested many times by users. For instance, such a reporting

Use Cases are a popular method for recording requirements.  With little effort, ProR can make recording Use Cases easy and traceable. To demonstrate this, we use ProR itself as an example.  Below is a screenshot of ProR, recording the use case “Create a new SpecObject”.  You can

At the core of the B-Method is a very expressive language rooted in predicate logic, set theory, relational calculus, higher-order functions and arithmetic. At the heart of our ProB toolset is an evaluator and constraint solver for this language. We strive for both efficiency and correctness, such that the

Formal Mind is pleased to invite you to the following event with Professor Jan Peleska and Professor Wen-Ling Huang: SysML, Formal Semantics and Their Uses in Model-Based Testing Monday, May 27th, 2013, 10:00-12:30 University of Düsseldorf Room 25.12.2.55 Lecture will be held in German. Participation is free

Formal Geist freut sich, Sie auf der folgenden Veranstaltung mitProfessor Jan Peleska und Professor Wen-Ling Huang laden: n n   SysML, formale Semantik und ihre Anwendung beim modellbasierten Testen Monday, May 27th, 201310:00-12:30 University of Düsseldorf Room 25.12.2.55 Vortrag wird in deutscher Sprache abgehalten werden. Nicht-Mitglieder des

n Formal Mind freut sich, Sie zu der folgenden Veranstaltung mitProfessor Jan Peleska und Professor Wen-Ling Huang einzuladen:   SysML, formale Semantik und ihre Anwendung beim modellbasierten Testen Montag, 27. Mai 2013, 10:00-12:30 Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf Room 25.12.2.55 Vortrag wird in deutscher Sprache gehalten. Die Teilnahme ist

We are proud to announce the release of RMF ProR 0.7.0 and ProR Essentials 0.7.0.  Download them now from the Eclipse website.  If you already have ProR 0.5.0 or newer, simply update via Help | Check for Updates. In Version 0.7.0, 16 features and bugs have been

The Atlas is a remarkable detector.  It weighs as much as the Eiffel tower, consists of 10 million parts, and generates more data each day than Twitter does.  But as a recent Economist article states, as impressive is the fact that it is a collaboration involving more

As more and more tools in the market support ReqIF, it becomes more and more important to inspect the generated files and to perform troubleshooting.  This is currently done in a systematic fashion by the ReqIF Implementor Forum,  a project group that ensures interoperability between different ReqIF-based

If you downloaded RMF/ProR Version 0.6.0, you may have had a problem when using an older Java version (less than Java 7, to be prcise).  We just published a service update that loosens this rather strict and unnecessary requirement.  No need to download the new version, just

We are proud to announce the publication of the ProR 0.6.0 snapshot.  While still in incubation, this version provides some significant improvements with respect to usability.  If you use ProR 0.5.0, you can update your installation simply via Help | Check for Updates.  Try it now, or

Update: The information shown here is outdated.  The current state of team support is described in the fmStudio Handbook.  We are working on commercial team support. If this is of interest to you, then please let us know, so that we can inform you when it is

Merge Conflicts In a team setting, there is always the risk of a merge conflict.  Without a conflicht, the Team plug-in automatically merges changes upon update.  But if a conflict occurs, the user has to intervene.  While the commit will still be triggered, the user will receive

We are happy to announce that we will be present at the conference FORMS/FORMAT in Braunschweig, both with a paper (and presentation) and a tool exhibition. The paper is entitled “A Systems Engineering Tool Chain Based on Eclipse and Rodin”. We’d be delighted to see you there.

We just released ProR Essentials 0.5.0, which comes with a new feature, an extension for comparing ReqIF files.  We also published ProR 0.5.0, which is required for using the new Essentials features. Installing, not upgrading A lot of refactoring happened for the new ProR release.  Therefore, unfortunately

Automated test are great (we use them – the RMF project currently runs over 200 automated tests, all passing).  But there are some situations where automating tests is just not worth the while – GUI tests are one example.  So the manual tests and their results have

The RMF team is proud to announce the availability of ProR 0.4.0.  You can download it from the Eclipse RMF Download page.  We hope that you will take the time to check it out. This build fixes 21 Bugs and Feature Requests, including: Better Performance – a

The ReqIF standard supports rich text, as do most professional requirements tools.  ProR, so far, did not support it.  Currently, ProR takes advantage of the “simplified” flag in ReqIF which allows tools to indicate that they don’t support rich text.  This was a temporary workaround, but obviously

During the last couple of years, agile methods were experiences a renaissance in systems development.  Organizations started to adapt their processes, and this included requirements engineering.    It’s actually tragic that at some point, agile development and requirements management were considered mutually exclusive.  This is certainly not

The RMF team is delighted to announce the 0.3.0 release of RMF and ProR.  If you currently use an older version, please be sure to update.  Please note that there is a separate update site for 0.3.0, so you won’t get the update automatically. You can download

While requirements engineering in itself is already useful, integrating it with other elements from the system development process can increase its value significantly.  We already hinted at this in our scientific work with respect to traceability, or our thoughts of an integration with Topcased.  Our latest ideas

English-Readers: Please excuse that the following article is written in German. Im HOOD-Blog wurde vor kurzem gezeigt, wie man mit Anforderungs-Templates besser im Projekt arbeiten kann.  Seit dem letzten Release sind in ProR alle Features vorhanden, um mit solchen Templates umgehen zu können.  Das Ergebnis ist im

The RMF team is proud to announce the i12.03 Integration build, which brings significant improvements both in the core and the ProR user interface.  Please download it at the RMF download site. In this iteration, we were focusing on the GUI and on the integration of a

A first prototype of a ProB Logic Calculator is now available online. With it you can evaluate arbitrary expressions and predicates (using B Syntax). It is a great way to learn about B, predicate logic and set theory or even just to solve arithmetic constraints and puzzles.

The presentation of ProR and RMF at the ReConf in Munich this week was well received.  We got plenty of constructive feedback both from real and potential users, as well as from contributors. We pledged to create a snapshot build every two months, and we will now

(Apologies to English speakers: This is an announcement in German for a German-language event) Innovationen vorstellen, Wissen austauschen und Kooperationen anregen – das ist das Motto der Veranstaltungsreihe Science meets Industry an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (HHU).  Beim nächsten Treffen am 20. März 2012 werden die Projekte aus

ReConf is one of the biggest requirements conferences in Europe, and Michael Jastram has been a regular speaker since 2007.  This year, he will give two talks: Structuring of Requirements for a tight integration with Models: requirements management and modeling are related and complementary, but how tightly

Good news to everyone interested in ProR – we finally have a snapshot build available on the RMF website.  If you are interested in ProR, ReqIF, etc., please give it a spin. The last release took place in August 2011 – an eternity ago, as far as

What happens if you start with UML, take a little away, add something new and tweak it a bit?  Depending on what exactly you add, you may end up with SysML.  SysML created some excitement in the requirements engineering (RE) community, as it provides some rudimentary tools

ProB 1.3.4 is available. The highlights of this release are: an “Evaluation View” to inspect formulas and values, an interactive “Eval” window to evaluate expressions and predicates, support for CSP assertion checking, an improved editor, e.g., with on-the-fly syntax highlighting, 64-bit versions for Mac and Linux are now

It took a long time, but we finally achieved it: RMF, and therefore ProR as well, passed the Eclipse IP Review.  A reason to celebrate! So what’s the next step?  We’ll populate the Eclipse Repository and will finally pick up development again. We will also strive to

Do you remember working for the first time with a tool that supported traceability?  What a change going from, say, word for capturing requirements to DOORS.  And do you remember the moment when the honeymoon was over?  There are many things that can make requirements traceability frustrating:

Wir werden mit einem Vortrag auf der EclipseCon 2011 in Ludwigsburg vertreten sein.  Am 3. November um 16:30 hält Michael Jastram mit Andreas Graf den Vortrag Requirements Modeling Framework: a Game-Changer.

Michael Jastram hat zusammen mit Andreas Graf einen Artikel zum RMF im Eclipse-Magazin veröffentlicht: Requirements Modeling Framework Im August 2011 hat das Requirements Modeling Framework (RMF) das Licht der Welt erblickt. RMF besteht aus einem Kern, der Daten im Requirements Exchange Format (RIF/ReqIf) verarbeiten kann, und einem

We are very excited to announce that ProR is now part of the Eclipse Foundation Requirements Modeling Framework (RMF).  We decided to use the name RMF (rather than ProR), to keep the distinction between the GUI (ProR) and the various RIF/ReqIF cores.  The initial submission to the

ProB 1.3.3 and ProB for Rodin 2.1 is available. Highlights: improved performance, constrained-based deadlock checking, record detection, and many more. Find out more on the ProB pages.