Business Semantics: Best Practices for Gathering Precise Requirements

This presentation will deal with the complexities of gathering complex business requirements from users that use industry-specific terminology. I will use examples from healthcare, insurance, finance, law enforcement, real estate, education and banking. I will also discuss the use of controlled vocabularies and metadata registries to manage this process and standards for creating and storing metadata (SKOS and 11179). I will also discuss case studies in federal data exchange standards. We will show how the skills for developing semanticlly precise data defintions are critical for areas such as business intelligence and enterprise data reporting.

Thinking about the client/consultant relationship

What is it that attracts some people to consulting; either as consultants or as clients? And what is it that makes or breaks a successful consulting engagement? Awareness of one's own skills and limitations is key.

We will discuss the importance of knowing your (and your client's) levels of competence and ignorance. Though often not the intent, these words, competence and ignorance, have come to have negative connotations in our society. Negative connotations aside, competence and ignorance are useful if not essential considerations when looking at client/consultant dynamics and communication patterns. And successful communication leads to successful engagements.

ABSTRACT:
A key tenant of any engineering discipline is ability to make design trade-offs based on economic reasoning. Rigorously applying economic techniques to design decision making requires capturing key decisions as repeatable, communicable abstractions. Software engineering still lags behind as an engineering discipline in its application of economic techniques to design decision making, in large part due to inability to share common design abstractions, especially at the level of software architecture.

Please join us for the first seminar of the Fall 2009 Master of Science in Software Engineering (MSSE) seminar series.

The MSSE seminars are presented by the University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center (UMSEC) and are open to the general public.

On Saturday morning, September 26, we will have two speakers.

Daniel F. Keefe (Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota) will present "Picturing Time: Data Visualization for Studying Biomechanical Motions".

Antonia Zhai (Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota) will present "Parallelization on Multicore --- Power and Performance Perspectives"

DATE: Saturday, September 26.

The University of Minnesota Software Engineering Center presents a Symposium on "Changing Regulations and Standards for Medical Device Software and Health Information Systems".

In this symposium, FDA representatives and industry leaders will provide an update on the status of standards used for medical device software and health information management systems and the current thinking of regulatory bodies regarding what they may require to evaluate the safety of these products.