Keynote - Jennifer Horkoff

Jennifer Horkoff

"Information Modeling for Continuous Revolution - Modeling Knowledge and Coordination in Large-Scale Agile Development"
(presentation)
In 1998 Prof. John Mylopoulos published "Information Modeling in the Time of the Revolution" based on a CAiSE'97 keynote. Here, the revolution was the "Information Revolution" leading to the rise of big data, laying the groundwork for today's prevalence of AI. In this keynote, I continue with the concept of information modeling, reporting on the application of such models as part of different, but related revolution: the rise (and fall?) of agile methods in software development. Over several years of work, my colleagues and I have found that the complexities of large-scale agile development call for methods and models to support knowledge transfer and coordination. Often such knowledge is requirements-related and involves trade-offs between team autonomy, agility, and effective coordination for complex and safety-critical software development. To this end, we have introduced and developed the BOMI (boundary objects and methodological islands) modeling framework for capturing coordination between methodological (agile) "islands" in a waterfall. Our work has evolved to consider several coordination-supporting information models, including traceability information models, and information models for coordination of knowledge in automotive perception systems. As the specifics of such information models vary highly per company and domain, we attempt to generalize by introducing information modeling principles and tooling. This keynote aims to summarize this line of work, presenting findings from ongoing projects with industry, and outlining future directions for the requirements-related modeling community.

Jennifer Horkoff is an Associate Professor at the Interaction Design and Software Engineering division in the Computer Science and Engineering Department shared by Chalmers University of Technology and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Dr. Horkoff is currently involved in projects investigating non-functional requirements for machine learning (supported by the Swedish Research Council - Vetenskapsrådet), and the role of RE and conceptual modeling in large-scale Agile (supported by the Chalmers Software Center in collaboration with local industry). Jennifer received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 2012 and received her Swedish Docent in 2020. She previously held post-doc positions at City University, London and the University of Trento, Italy. She has been an author or co-author of more than 100 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, or workshops. Jennifer has been a co-program chair of RE, REFSQ, ER and PoEM, and has served on program committees and organizing committees of several international conferences (e.g., ICSE, RE, ER, MODELS, CAiSE), and has been a (co-) organizer of several international workshops.

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