Reading: Jackson

The second paper I will ask you to read concerns requirements analysis and specification:

Jackson, M. 1995. The world and the machine. In Proceedings of the 17th international Conference on Software Engineering (Seattle, Washington, United States, April 24 - 28, 1995). ICSE '95. ACM, New York, NY, 283-292. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/225014.225041

This is among the most lucid accounts I know of what it means to write a specification. The writing is light-hearted (the paragraph about steering mechanisms for cars busts me up laughing), but it's a very serious and deep consideration of the topic ... it's worth reading more than once, and thinking carefully about.

The paper accompanied an invited (keynote) talk at the International Conference on Software Engineering. Two years later, Jackson and Zave published a journal paper which encompasses some of the same material. If you like this paper, you might (at your option) follow on with:

Zave, P. and Jackson, M. 1997. Four dark corners of requirements engineering. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 6, 1 (Jan. 1997), 1-30. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/237432.237434