Complete thesis - Murdoch University

30 April 2004 And here we have a big problem!People who read our presentations, especially inexperienced ones, believe that this ishow the results have been obtained (top-down). They try to follow the example and fail.Ilia Bider (Sweden)1 May 2004 ... and others use the fact that even experienced REs do *some*bottom-up RE/RA as an excuse for *always* doing bottom-up orbottom-only (the real danger). They also use it as an excuse forbottom-up design, which is something rather different.I’ve seen internationally respected systems engineers at work,including those that give some of the more popular industrialstrength (as opposed to academic) SyE courses.They almost always use a mixture, but some strenuously deny that they do *any* bottomup. Somehow this part of their analysis/design is invisible to them.If you read practical SyE texts, you would be be forgiven for believing that SyE is areductionist approach. In practice, it rarely is, but there is always some reductionism(otherwise you’d never finish the job, obviously). That doesn’t mean the texts or processmodels are necessarily wrong, just incomplete like all models.Andrew Gabb (Australia)The comment by Collier, above, is pertinent. Parnas and Clements (1986) suggest that,given an irrational design process (ie all design processes), the documentation should makeit appear as though it were. This faking of the appearance of rationality is justified throughthe need to make the eventual maintenance task easier, as well as enabling new members ofthe design team to absorb knowledge about the project more easily. However, the processto such simplification (as described by Nguyen and Swatman (2000b)) is hidden and, asnoted by Bider above, leads to unreal expectations in novice undertakings. The danger ofsimplification in a learning environment is discussed in Chapter 3.2.2.5 Addressing wicked RE educationContinuing the discussion in RE-Online (Zowghi, 2004):57