» Mohamed Hassan Kassab

Mohamed Hassan Kassab

Associate Professor of Software Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, Malvern, PA, U.S.A.

Biography

Dr. Mohamad Kassab is an associate professor and a member of the graduate faculty at The Pennsylvania State University. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Kassab was an affiliate assistant professor in the department of computer science and software engineering at Concordia University between 2010 and 2012 and a postdoctoral researcher in software engineering at Ecole de Technologie Supérieure (ETS) in Montreal between 2011 and 2012, and a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) between 2014 and 2015.
Dr. Kassab has been conducting research projects jointly with the industry to develop formal and quantitative models to support the integration of quality requirements within software and systems development life cycles. The models are being further leveraged with the support of developed architectural frameworks and tools. His research interests also include bridging the gap between software engineering practices and disruptive technologies (e.g., IoT, blockchain). He has published extensively in software engineering books, journals, and conference proceedings. He is also a member of numerous professional societies and program committees, and the organizer of many software engineering workshops and conference sessions.
With over twenty years of global industry experience, Dr. Kassab has developed a broad spectrum of skills and responsibilities in many software engineering areas. Notable experiences include business unit manager at Soramitsu, senior quality engineer at SAP, senior quality engineer at McKesson, senior associate at Morgan Stanley, senior quality assurance specialist at NOKIA, and senior software developer at Positron Safety Systems. He is an Oracle Certified Application Developer, Sun Certified Java Programmer, and Microsoft Certified Professional.
Dr. Kassab has taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate software engineering and computer science courses at Penn State and Concordia University. He has won many awards for his excellence in teaching.

About the Talk

The Current and Evolving Landscape of Requirements Engineering in Practice

Abstract

Forty years after Requirements Engineering (RE) was acknowledged for the first time as an independent discipline in an issue of the Transactions of Software Engineering, a large portion of everyday industrial practices is still dominated by conventional wisdom rather than governed by empirical evidence. The low practical impact of many of the RE community’s contributions and the disconnect between researchers and practitioners have been a topic of discussion within the RE community. Some projects have succeeded with little or no agreement on requirements. The increasing adoption of Agile practices in software development challenges the need for rigorously describing software requirements upfront, which industry practitioners consider a moving target. Some practical evidence furthermore indicates that specifying requirements can hinder creativity and design because designers become overly preoccupied with the information provided. To this end, and to pave the road for the industrial adoption of RE research contributions, there is a need to close the knowledge gap between the practices in industry and results from research. The key issue in improving RE industrial practices is to first identify the areas that need the most improvement. In this presentation, we present the findings from exploratory studies we conducted on the evolving state of practice of RE.

All session by Mohamed Hassan Kassab

The Current and Evolving Landscape of Requirements Engineering in Practice

14:45 – 15:30

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