The replacement of legacy systems in the public sector is fraught with project delays, budgetary overruns, technological and business process complexities. Moreover, the software implemented to replace legacy systems is developed or configured to largely mimic their features and functionality in order to minimize the disruption to organizational operations that accompanies the introduction of new technology. When the requirements for legacy replacement primarily replicate existing applications and processes, opportunities for business process improvement are bypassed. However, it is difficult for practitioners to transcend the business and systems models prevalent in their organizations for many years. The challenge is to support them to overcome such a difficulty, and be creative and engaged during requirements discussions. Our research aims to evaluate the utility of gamifying the requirements activities during legacy replacement projects for scoping replacement systems efforts in a way that takes advantage of opportunities for innovation while minimizing unnecessary changes to the status quo. The supplementation of the requirements process with game elements is explored in our research through the development of a requirements discussion game (RE-PROVO) and its evaluation by practitioners in two government agencies. Our findings reveal that key elements of RE-PROVO, including competition, anonymity and roleplay, encourage a more critical evaluation of business requirements in legacy replacement projects, but that the success of requirements gamification is contingent on a proper incentivization model which takes organizational culture and values into account.

Currently, adult higher education software engineering pedagogy isolates the student in a controlled environment during delivery, with application of their learning temporally distant from their professional practice. Delivering software engineering teaching that is immediately relevant to professional practice remains an open challenge. In this paper, we discuss a new pedagogical model which addresses this problem by embedding the validation of the student's learning within their rich professional context. We discuss our experience of applying the model to the design and delivery of a new post-graduate software development module, a core component in our new software engineering Masters qualification at the Open University, UK, a market leader in adult higher education at a distance.

The Open University is a distance-based higher education institution. Most of our students are in employment and study from home, contacting their tutor and fellow students via e-mail and discussion forums. In this paper, we describe our undergraduate and postgraduate modules in the software systems area, how we teach them at a distance, and our focus on shifting our students' minds into a reflective, critical, holistic socio-technical view of software systems that is relevant to their particular professional contexts.

Early software development approaches focused on program code as paramount, paying little attention to any analysis or understanding of its generative real-world context and needs. More modern problem-oriented approaches view software development as problem solving, and use many of the rich toolset and techniques of the knowledge engineering (KE) area. ‘When one encounters a new situation (or makes a substantial change in one's view of the present problem) one selects from memory a structure called a Frame. This is a remembered framework to be adapted to fit reality by changing details as necessary’. ‘We intuitively believe that experienced problem solvers construct new systems by modifying known systems’. Both Problem Frames and Domain Theory use modelling as a means for problem understanding and representation. In this respect, they are akin to the Common KADS framework (Breuker & van de Velde, 2004) that provides a suite of re-usable knowledge models for expert systems development. According to Studer et al. (1998), modelling marks an important transition from first-generation to second-generation expert systems, as the modelling approach to knowledge engineering had taken over the knowledge transfer approach. Problem-oriented approaches to software development have two essential attributes. Firstly, they recognise the need to work iteratively between real-world problem and software solution to increase understanding: solutions are sometimes straw men, allowing the developer to reflect on the problem to understand it better. Indeed, the importance of this knowledge building process in design has been widely acknowledged (Alexander, 1979; Dasgupta, 1991). Secondly, they view software development as problem solving and knowledge reuse. This special section collects the best papers presented at the International Workshop on Advances and Applications of Problem Orientation, held in Cape Town, South Africa, in May 2010. These papers represent a snapshot of current research and practice in problem-oriented approaches to software development. In the first paper, Luigi Lavazza addresses the problem that during analysis and development user requirements are elicited and perceived at various levels of abstraction, by proposing a systematic approach to relating such diverse requirements through the establishment of requirements hierarchies. The work is situated within Problem Frames and applied to a comprehensive case study. The work is particularly relevant to addressing business problems in which a need arises to relate business goals to software requirements. In the second paper, Xinyu Wang and his colleagues present an approach that guides a business analyst to derive a set of problem frames from a given problem description. The approach contains three steps. In the first step, business process models are developed to capture the behavioural view of the problem context. In the second step, object analysis models are used to capture the structural view of the problem context. Together, these two views collectively and comprehensively capture the early context knowledge. These two types of model are then used in a third step to construct context diagrams and problem frames. Finally, Jelena Marincic and her colleagues address the problem of how to construct adequate problem models, the starting point of solution seeking, through methods that properly account for both formal and informal modelling decisions and steps. Their approach is located within an industrial setting and the development of embedded systems. Action research was applied in such a setting to help improve problem analysis and problem model validation. Collectively, this special section aims to give a flavour of current thinking in this important area of research and practice. We hope this special section will continue to stimulate the debate and discussion.

The convergence of 3D simulation and social networking into current multi-user virtual environments has opened the door to new forms of interaction for learning in order to complement the face-to-face and Web 2.0-based systems. Yet, despite a growing user community, design knowledge for virtual worlds remains patchy, particularly when it comes to an understanding of the particular nature of design in virtual environments, the relationship between virtual and real-world contexts of design, as well as the engineering issues it raises and the management of any related risks. In this article, we explore such issues based on our experience of socio-technical engineering of a novel learning programme for higher education with a substantial virtual component. The project's significance stems from the large number of stake-holders involved, the relatively large scale of the virtual world development and the strategic significance of such a development within the learning programme. Of particular novelty is our exploration of the relationship between virtual and real-world contexts of design, indicating when they align and differ, showing when tools and techniques translate and when new tools and techniques may be required.

This paper reports on the design of a Second Life campus for a new innovative post-graduate research programme at the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The programme, launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous and asynchronous Internet technologies. This paper briefly discusses the pedagogical thinking behind the Second Life campus, and the way the implementation was designed to meet the pedagogy. The paper also reports on the outcome of an early evaluation we have conducted.

Software problems originate from real world problems. A software solution must address its real world problem in a satisfactory way. A software engineer must therefore understand the real world problem that their software intends to address. To be able to do this, the software engineer must understand the problem context and how it is to be affected by the proposed software, expressed as the requirements. Without this knowledge the engineer can only hope to chance upon the right solution for the problem. Application of problem-oriented approaches may well be a way of meeting this challenge.

Design rationale in software engineering fills in the gaps between the original requirements of a system and the finished product encompassing decisions, constraints and other information that influenced the outcome. Existing research corroborates the importance of design rationale to capture knowledge assets, particularly in the context of the global enterprise, with its increased risk of knowledge loss through staff movement and attrition. Despite this, the practice of design rationale capture and reuse is not as extensive as could be expected mainly due to time and budget constraints and lack of standards and tools. In this paper we report on and industrial study which tested the hypothesis that an emerging design approach - Problem Oriented Engineering (POE) - enables the capture of design rationale as the methodological by-product of software engineering activities, hence potentially addresses concerns over cost effectiveness of in situ design rationale capture. The results are encouraging, providing an early indication that using POE for solving software problems in an industrial setting may allow the capture of design rationale with no additional effort needed.

In this position paper, we present an initial Problem Oriented Engineering foundation for a small part of Pattern-Oriented Analysis and Design (POAD). We argue for the interpretation of software design patterns as instructions for transforming quality requirements into an architecture and a 'stress test'; and show, incidentally, how to reuse an existing software component and its justification in a new development.

The paper reports on the application of Problem Oriented Engineering (POE) to the design of a highly innovative post-graduate research programme for the Open University, UK, a world leader in supported distance higher education. The new programme, to be launched in October 2009, is a part-time Master of Philosophy (MPhil) to be delivered entirely at a distance, supported by a blend of synchronous, asynchronous and immersive internet and web technologies. POE is a framework for engineering design under development at the Open University. After a brief description of the project and the task at hand, the paper discusses the overall engineering approach taken, key aspects of product design, the mapping between requirements and technology, and the development of one key technological component.

The design of assurance cases has been hampered by the posit-and-prove approach to software and systems engineering; it has been observed that, traditionally, a product is produced and then evidence from the development is looked for to build an assurance case. Although assured development is possible, there has been a recent drive towards the proactive design of the assurance case. Assurance-driven design is a development method that considers the assurance argument - similar to an assurance case - to be as important as the product. In this paper, we introduce assurance-driven design, as part of our problem oriented engineering framework, and show how software and assurance argument can be built together.

We are very pleased to be associated with the four papers on problem frames (Jackson, 2001; Cox et al., 2005) that appear in this special issue of Expert Systems, The Journal of Knowledge Engineering. In its 25 years of publication, Expert Systems has seen many changes in the landscape of expert systems. The technologies have matured from their early forms to become robust and the basis of many fine systems. The areas in which they have been applied have expanded and many areas of modern life now contain them. The design of solutions based on knowledge engineering technologies continues apace in many areas of modern relevance: recent volumes of Expert Systems have seen applications to financial market volatility (Oh et al., 2006), heart beat instability (Ubeyli, 2007), water quality improvement (Hatzikos et al., 2007) and even adolescent well-being (Wang et al., 2007). The application of knowledge engineering techniques depends to a large extent on the skills of software engineers; and few would argue against a view of software engineering as overlapping knowledge engineering. Software requirements engineering, for instance, has learned much from reflection on core knowledge engineering techniques of elicitation, representation and classification. The flow is both ways, of course, and the reflective knowledge engineering community is reappraising the work on expert systems in the light of what software engineering has achieved; Sagheb-Tehrani (2006), for instance, provides an investigation of the processes of design of expert systems to determine why many of them have been unsuccessful at their primary task. The critique points to the work of the designer, or knowledge engineer, coming increasingly under scrutiny as technological achievement needs converting into products and services, with notions of fitness-for-purpose becoming of heightened importance in what is now a large industry. The role of designer as knowledge engineer is broad both in scope and application. In terms of scope, we distinguish the designer as radical inventor at one end of the spectrum from normal designer at the other: both are creative, both work iteratively, both work as knowledge engineers, both have a view of the product or service to be provided, but it is techniques and support for those towards the normal design end–those whose role requires an ability to build a product or service that can be assured, in all probability, to satisfy its design goals first time–that can be the basis of a sustainable engineering discipline. Normal design was identified by Vincenti (1990), and is likely to play an increasingly important role in the theory of design, including that of expert systems. One might ask how normal design is practised. One way is through the use of ‘patterns’ (see, for instance, Moynihan et al., 2006), with a pattern describing successful recurring solutions to common problems. Problem frames are a more recent and successful addition to the pattern literature, and are designed to assist in the software requirements phase of software intensive system development by capturing recurring ‘problems’ in software; this theme is continued in Jackson's Foreword to this issue (Jackson, 2008). One important aspect of the normal practice of capturing recurrent problems, rather than solutions, in traditional engineering disciplines is that they lead to practical, rather than technological, specialists, and that is another powerful thesis of Jackson. We hope that you enjoy reading the papers in this issue and any subsequent reflection on your own discipline. The four papers in this volume illustrate the broad applicability of problem frames. Strunk and Knight, in their paper ‘The essential synthesis of problem frames and assurance cases’, tackle the difficult issue of building an assurance case, i.e. a collection of evidence and argument in defence of a system's fitness for purpose, during early problem analysis. A convincing assurance case is the basis of a decision of whether to commission a system and, ultimately, its value to the customer. Lavazza and del Bianco, in ‘Enhancing problem frames with scenarios and histories in UML-based software development’, show how effective and beneficial it is to consider not only the structure and behaviour of a problem's context, but also its typical scenarios and past history. They find that scenarios offer good support for the merging of subproblems, for addressing frame concern issues and for design models, a result of obvious potential importance in problem frames and other knowledge engineering areas. Jørgenson, in ‘Coloured Petri nets and graphical animation: a proposal for a means to address problem frame concerns’, demonstrates how some very polished Petri net tools can be employed to make the understanding of a problem, expressed in the problem frames' notation, easier to a stakeholder. One exciting element of this work is that it includes not only the behaviour of the system but also the frame concerns, i.e. those arguments that show that early problem analysis has been successful. Lencastre, Araujo, Moreira and Castro, in ‘Towards aspectual problem frames: an example’, show how another modern development technology, aspect orientation, works to provide a more modular, evolvable approach to problem framing. Begun in 2004, the IWAAPF workshop series has encouraged those with an interest in requirements engineering to come together, biannually, to discuss their areas of expertise. The 2006 IWAAPF workshop, at which the original versions of these papers were presented, was successful due to the hard work of everyone involved. Many of the original reviewers helped in the preparation of this special issue, and we thank them greatly for their help. Thanks also to those in Wiley-Blackwell's Expert Systems' office who have made this special issue available in good time. Last, but by no means least, to Michael Jackson go our thanks for presenting such a stimulating avenue of research.

Problem Orientation is gaining interest as a way of approaching the development of software intensive systems and yet a significant example that explores its use is missing from the literature. In this paper, we present the basic elements of Problem Oriented Software Engineering (POSE) which aims to bring both non-formal and formal aspects of software development together in a single framework. We provide an example of a detailed and systematic POSE development of a software problem, that of designing the controller for a package router. The problem is drawn from the literature, but the analysis presented here is new. The aim of the example is twofold: to illustrate the main aspects of POSE and how it supports software engineering design, and to demonstrate how a non-trivial problem can be dealt with by the approach.

A key challenge for software engineering is to learn how to reconcile the formal world of the machine and its software with the non-formal real world. In this paper, we discuss elements of problem oriented software engineering (POSE), an approach that brings both non- formal and formal aspects of software development together in a single theoretical framework for software engineering design. POSE presents development as the representation and step-wise transformation of software problems. It allows for the identification and clarification of system requirements, the understanding and structuring of the problem world, the structuring and specification of a hardware/software machine that can ensure satisfaction of the requirements in the problem world, and the construction of adequacy arguments, convincing both to developers and to customers, users and other interested parties, that the system will provide what is needed. Examples are used throughout the paper to illustrate how formal and non-formal descriptions are reconciled under POSE.

Software problems originate from real world problems. A software solution must address its real world problem in a satisfactory way. A software engineer must therefore understand the real world problem that their software intends to address. To be able to do this, the software engineer must understand the problem context and how it is to be affected by the proposed software, expressed as the requirements. Without this knowledge the engineer can only hope to chance upon the right solution for the problem. Application of the Problem Frames approach may well be a way of meeting this need.

The reference model of Gunter et al, 2000, provides a framework for describing and analyzing key software engineering artifacts and their properties. We propose a reification of this framework in which behaviour is explicitly trace-based. We find that this benefits the formalism in adding structure in ways which are meaningful and practical from an engineering viewpoint. In particular, we develop notions of points of introduction and reachability in the new framework, and show how they strengthen the properties of the reference model.

This paper reports on an investigation into the use of real-time voice groupware to support students on a computing course offered by the Open University, UK. The main objective of the investigation was to assess the feasibility and pedagogical advantage of deploying synchronous conferencing technology on a large population computing course to complement existing face-to-face and asynchronous online support for its students. In this paper we report on the findings from such an investigation, and draw a number of conclusions and recommendations covering feasibility, scalability and best practice in the use of voice groupware for eLearning.

Problem frames provide a means of analyzing and decomposing problems. They emphasise the world outside of the computer, helping the developer to focus on the problem domain, instead of drifting into inventing solutions. However, even modestly complex problems can force us into detailed consideration of the architecture of the solution. This is counter to the intention of the problem frames approach, which is to delay consideration of the solution space until a good understanding of the problem is gained. We therefore extend problem frames, allowing architectural structures, services and artifacts to be considered as part of the problem domain. Through a case study, we show how this extension enhances the applicability of problem frames in permitting an architecture-based approach to software development. We conclude that, through our extension, the applicability of problem frames is extended to include domains with existing architectural support.