A research has studied different views of suppliers and customers have of solution projects that include both provided goods and rendered services. The goal of the research is to help the suppliers and customers to understand each other better, and therefore make solution projects more profitable for the suppliers and be more effective for the customers. We are involved in an infrastructure improvement project that shares many characteristics of a solution project. Our early experience suggests introducing a contractor view that is different from the supplier and customer views. Our experience also indicates that effective requirements engineering, under the constraint of lengthy and complex contractual requirements is of great importance for the project success.

Platforms, frameworks, and other forms of software assets are proliferating in the industry for well-documented reasons. Architects may choose from a wide variety of implementation technologies to realize their envisioned software architecture. Each asset provides the ability to fulfill a set of requirements, and imposes a set of constraints. Given these complex compatibility relationships, it is a non-trivial task to determine how best to utilize candidate assets toward a defined business problem. This task is made harder when multiple stakeholders from various backgrounds contribute to the decision-making process, as often occurs in large projects.By grouping requirements by functional area, and relating them to corresponding candidate technologies, we propose an approach that allows stakeholders to collaboratively reason about the satisfaction of requirements, the compatibility of technologies, and integration risk. The goal is to narrow the initial space of technologies to a smaller number of viable candidate technology sets.

Healthcare software systems are becoming more and more complex since they will be highly integrated to support a wide variety of healthcare workflows (e.g., financial, administration, diagnosis, and treatment). In addition, healthcare software systems will be more safety-critical as they will provide medical decision support for doctors. All of those require systematic and thorough testing of the systems before they are put into use or upgraded. Model-Based Testing (MBT) is an approach to apply formal, explicit system use-models to generate the test cases for testing the system behaviors under different input data sets. This paper describes our experiences in applying this approach to testing some Siemens healthcare software systems. We will report the benefits and challenges in using MBT for testing healthcare software systems.

Medical informatics and software engineering researchers have studied how to use software technologies to define, analyze, automate, and provide decision support for healthcare workflows. We, as the requirements engineering and prototyping group of the Siemens R&D center, have been involved in the research and development of both financial and clinical healthcare workflows. During interactions with the workflow users (e.g. physicians, nurses), researchers and software developers, we found significant confusion about the terminologies and the purposes of supporting different healthcare workflows. Thus, we are motivated to classify computer-aided healthcare workflows, including their approaches, goals, and major characteristics. This paper also discusses workflow application issues and software challenges based upon our experiences and research.

Medical informatics and software engineering researchers have studied how to use software technologies to define, analyze, automate, and provide decision support for healthcare workflows. We, as the requirement engineering and prototyping group of the Siemens R&D center, have been involved in the research and development of healthcare workflows. During interactions with the workflow users and developers, we found significant confusion about the terminologies and the purposes of supporting different healthcare workflows. Thus, we are motivated to classify computer-aided healthcare workflows, including their approaches, goals, and major characteristics. This paper also discusses workflow application issues and software challenges based upon our experiences and research.

This paper defines a highly concurrent, yet integrated software prototyping process for defining requirements. The process is particularly aimed at developing user-interface intensive, workflow-centered software. The Software Engineering Department and User Interface Design Center at Siemens Corporate Research (SCR) have successfully practiced this process in prototyping a healthcare information system over the last year to identify a set of preliminary functional requirements for the corresponding product. The prototype developed is intended to be of high quality, customizable and thus it can aid the communication between a company's marketing team and Siemens customers to further refine the product requirements. Our experience with this process demonstrates that it is feasible and effective to carry out the requirements definition and prototyping in a highly concurrent fashion given stable prototype software architecture and the readily available domain knowledge.