Phd candidate : Timo laudan, eads innovation Works President : Prof. Manfred broy, Technical University of Munich

• PhD Candidate : Timo LAUDAN, EADS Innovation Works

• President : Prof. Manfred BROY, Technical University of Munich

• Reviewers : Prof. Benoit EYNARD, Université de Technologie Compiègne Prof. Pascal Le MASSON, Ecole des Mines de Paris

• Industrial Supervisors : Philippe HOMSI, Airbus SAS (Unfortunately not here today)

• Dr. Michel DUREIGNE, EADS Innovation Works

• Axel MAURITZ, EADS Innovation Works

• Scientific Supervisors : Prof. Michel TOLLENAERE, University of Grenoble, G-SCOP

• Prof. Mickaël GARDONI, University of Strasbourg (INSA), LGeCo

Presentation Outline

Presentation Outline

• Research Organisation

• Research Scope

• Research Opportunity

• Research Question

• Research Methodology

• Theory - Reviewed Concepts

Research Organisation

Research Scope

• Collaboration between Business and Product Development (PD) Teams establishing the top-level product definition (requirement analysis)…

• in context Project-and engineering-based Organisation

Research Opportunity (1/2)

• Context

• Traditional requirements analysis models focused on system- and user interactions

• Much efforts – in particular industrial - on logical breakdown, management, dissemination and proof on the level of implementation of requirements without being strongly connected to the organisation and its business intents

• Related Work

• Focus on “front-end negotiations”: early requirements analysis activities concerned with reconciling business problems, opportunities and product (high-level) requirements

• Intentional modelling: semi-formal and formal approaches using the concept of goals to develop coherent requirement models that aims at increasing rationalisation and confidence in engineering definitions

Research Opportunity (2/2)

• Challenges - Literature shows that…

• Coordination and communication gap in project-and engineering based organisations, especially between stakeholders and developers (Karlson et al. 2007)

• Lack of means that enables to perform stakeholder cooperation within the product development process (Kavakli/Loucopoulos 2003)

• Problem of supporting cross-community in knowledge creation and sharing is relatively under-investigated (Novak/Wurst 2004)

• Formalisms in early requirements analysis fall short in establishing “usable” intentional structures to be used non-experts (Lamsweerde 2004)

Research Question Problematic

• Research Question

• How to organise collaboration and knowledge conversion between business management and PD Teams concerned with the elaboration of top-level product requirements?

• In context of the research question…

• How to find coherence (adequacy, completeness and consistency) within the evolution of the project’s product on the level of business and engineering?
• How to maintain and trace knowledge evolutions in context of the project’s product between business and engineering?

Research Methodology

Theory (1/3) Reviewed Concepts to Study Collaboration and Knowledge Conversion in Cross-Communities – Key Features

• Collaboration To understand principles of social interaction

• Two individuals or larger collectives of individuals (communities) [OED 2003, Bahrdt 2000]
• Modes of communication, cooperation and coordination towards the established objective for collaboration (group awareness, emergence) [cf. Elsen 2007]

• Knowledge To understand the object of collaboration

• Knowledge should be exchanged within the objective of collaboration [Elsen 2007] (different natures of knowledge, different knowledge conversion modes)

• Context To understand how other people can understand and learn from knowledge in its initial meaning

• Essential for knowledge conversion of organisation and its actors for taking appropriate and valuable actions [Klemke 1999; Kivijärvi 2004]

• Ontology To understand how to coordinate and organise knowledge conversion

• Offering a skeletal and relational organisation for knowledge bases associated to represent different viewpoints based on the organisational level and area [Huettenegger 2006; Swartout et al 1996]

Theory (2/3) Reviewed Concepts to Study Collaboration and Knowledge Conversion in Cross-Communities – Key Features

• Organisation To understand the frame in which collaboration appears

• Organisations are “immense” interpretation systems [cf. Daft/Weick 1984; Baumard 1999]
• Organisation and the smaller unit community provide the frame in which collaboration could occur

• Challenges reaching knowledge conversion in cross-communities (Novak/Wurst 2004):

• Different “thought worlds”
• Different knowledge perspectives
• Establish a shared Context of Knowing
• Perspective Making and Perspective Taking
• Boundary Objects (Interpretable Knowledge artefacts)
• Visualisation of cross-community knowledge perspectives

Theory (3/3) Conclusion on Reviewed Concepts

Presentation Outline

• Empirical Context

• Conduction of Empirical Study

• Results of the Empirical Study

Empirical Context

Conduction of the Study (1/2) Collect Data

Conduction of the Study (2/2) Structure & Interpret Data

Results of the Study (1/3)

Results (2/3) Industrial Problematic in Context of the Research Question

• P.1 Business intents are stored in different information formats and spaces

• P2. Flat and non-contextualized representation (macro-viewing on documents) of business intents

• P3. PD teams often loose the justifying connection to business intents throughout the PD process

• P4. PD teams are often unsure if they implemented business intents completely and consistent in forms of requirements

• P5. Difficult to prove and trust the correct implementation of business intents in engineering processes and information spaces

Results (3/3) Industrial Need in Context of the Research Question

Presentation Outline

• Construction of Conceptual Solution

Conceptual Solution Model (1/8) Confluence of Reviewed Concepts

Conceptual Solution Model (2/8) Structure, organise, specify and deploy business intents on principles provided by Knowledge-CoCoOn

Conceptual Solution Model (3/8) The Role of Collaboration in the BNE-P Model

Conceptual Solution Model (4/8) The Role of Collaboration in the BNE-P Model

Conceptual Solution Model (5/8) The Role of Ontology in the BNE-P Model

Conceptual Solution Model (6/8) The Role of Ontology in the BNE-P Model

Conceptual Solution Model (7/8) The Role of Context in the BNE-P Model

Conceptual Solution Model (8/8) The Role of Context in the BNE-P Model

Presentation Outline

• Overview experiments

• Experiment 1- Test the implementation of BNE-P Model Classes and Attributes

• Experiment 2- Test valuation and traceability made possible by the BNE-P Model

• Induced Developments

Three Different Experiments

Experiment 1 (1/5) VIVACE: Context

• In the second half of VIVACE (first year of the thesis) a project task was launched which allowed us to apply the developed BNE-P model

• At that stage (partially) business intents and engineering definitions were established, but in an individual mode (different structures, spread over different types of documents, …)

Experiment 1 (2/5) VIVACE: BNE-P Model Definition

Experiment 1 (3/5) VIVACE: BNE-P Model Implementation

Experiment 1 (4/5) VIVACE: Methodological Review

Experiment 1 (5/5) VIVACE: Feedbacks against empirical findings

Experiment 2 (1/8) VIVACE: Context

Experiment 2 (2/8) VIVACE: 1/ Evaluation of Soft-Goal Tree

Experiment 2 (3/8) VIVACE: 1/ Evaluation of Soft-Goal Tree

Experiment 2 (4/8) VIVACE: 1/ Evaluation of Soft-Goal Tree

Experiment 2 (5/8) VIVACE: 2/ Tracing Mechanisms

Experiment 2 (6/8) VIVACE: 2/ Tracing Mechanisms

Experiment 2 (7/8) VIVACE: Review

Experiment 2 (8/8) VIVACE: Review

Induced Developments Updated Prototypical Environment

Presentation Outline

• Contributions and Criticisms

• Complementary Research Issues

• Concluding Remark

Contribution and Criticisms (1/3)

• Result 1: BNE-P Model

• Contribution to Theory

• A knowledge-driven proposal to intentional modelling structuring, organising and deploying business intents informally

• Identification of goal-trees and resulting specified requirements to serve collaboration scenes at the interface of business and engineering
• Enables a first proof of coherency before entering into heavier formalisms
• Can provide attributes that relate to project management information and keep the link to business & engineering information spaces (documents)

• Perspectives (limitations and open issues)

• Clear lack of integration with stronger formalisms in intentional modelling.

•  Integrate strategies to perform transversal proof of coherency amongst a number of goal-trees organised in various BNE-Ps

• Proof of different interdependency types amongst BNE-P organised goal-structures, e.g. semantic, cost/value, time

Contribution and Criticisms (2/3)

• Result 1: BNE-P Model (Experiment 1+3)

• Contribution to Practice

• VIVACE: Increased visibility / transparency on the VIVACE project (from the inside & outside) in the closure phase of the project

• Perspectives (limitations and open issues)

• VIVACE: Clear lack of experimentations in set-up and execution phase of project

•  Investigate the BNE-P Model along the PD process and include phase-specific surveys: interview cycles, questionnaires, etc.

•  To investigate business and engineering domain members’ behaviours during collaborations and knowledge conversions

Contribution and Criticisms (3/3)

• Result 2: BNE-P Evaluative Model including Traceability

• Contribution to Theory/Practice (Experiment 2)

• Orientation on value adding activities: improved indication of expected functional qualities and orientation on prioritised business communities’ intentional structures

• Reflexive Traceability: The BNE-P evaluative model provides channels for cross-domain associativity (introduced as boundary objects) offering a logic to follow in bottom-up or top-down fashions throughout intentional (BNE-P) and engineering information structures

• Perspectives (limitations and open issues)

• Clear lack of proof under operational conditions

• Open issues:

• Integration with stakeholder analysis approaches

• Integration with higher level metrics (on enterprise level)

• Scalability (balancing appropriate method and tool assembly in context of the collaboration challenge)

Complementary Research Issues

• BNE-P Model

• Investigate BNE-P in ideation phase that allows researches (and R&T strategy) to prepare argumentation baseline towards new innovations.
• Investigate BNE-P on a different scale, e.g. SME:
• In particular, what are relevances of BNE-P if we face a non collaborative situation? That means business intent and formalisation in forms of specified requirements is done by the same person.

• Empirical Study Results

• Validate surveyed results in context of other projects (same or different context)
• Use surveyed material for quantitative research (e.g. compiling questionnaire with closed questions) and proof hypothesis and establish generalised statements

Concluding Remark

• The presented work advocates the point that if current intentional models fall short in establishing usable intentional structures that are able to provide the transparency for supporting continuously business-engineering evolutions within collaboration and knowledge conversions along a PD process, then it could be valuable to have a mediating instance that organises collaboration and knowledge conversions.

• It can act (promote) in front of stronger formalisms in terms of coherency development in requirements.
• It could strengthen negotiation forces and group-awareness among business and engineering community.
• It provides organisation of knowledge bases, i.e. community-related information spaces and anchors a value-oriented definition of business intent.
• It supports not only front-end negotiations, but also establishes continuous interactivity structures and strengthens product development performance in terms of increasing reactivity and group-awareness between business-engineering.

• Many Thanks!