Problem Frames Approach

Problem analysis or the problem frames approach is an approach to software requirements analysis. It was developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson in the 1990s.

The problem frames approach was first sketched by Jackson in his book Software Requirements & Specifications (1995) and in a number of articles in various journals devoted to software engineering. It has received its fullest description in his Problem Frames: Analysing and Structuring Software Development Problems (2001).

A session on problem frames was part of the 9th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ)] held in Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria in 2003. The First International Workshop on Applications and Advances in Problem Frames was held as part of ICSE’04 held in Edinburgh, Scotland. One outcome of that workshop was a 2005 special issue on problem frames in the International Journal of Information and Software Technology.

The Second International Workshop on Applications and Advances in Problem Frames was held as part of ICSE 2006 in Shanghai, China. The Third International Workshop on Applications and Advances in Problem Frames (IWAAPF) was held as part of ICSE 2008 in Leipzig, Germany. In 2010, the IWAAPF workshops were replaced by the International Workshop on Applications and Advances of Problem-Orientation (IWAAPO). IWAAPO broadens the focus of the workshops to include alternative and complementary approaches to software development that share an emphasis on problem analysis. IWAAPO-2010 was held as part of ICSE 2010 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Today research on the problem frames approach is being conducted at a number of universities, most notably at the Open University in the United Kingdom as part of its Relating Problem & Solution Structures research theme Interesting work is being done by Professors Lavazza and del Bianco on using problem frames with UML.

The ideas in the problem frames approach have been generalized into the concepts of problem-oriented development (POD) and problem-oriented engineering (POE), of which problem-oriented software engineering (POSE) is a particular sub-category. The first International Workshop on Problem-Oriented Development was held in June 2009.

Problem analysis or the problem frames approach is an approach — a set of concepts — to be used when gathering requirements and creating specifications for computer software. Its basic philosophy is strikingly different from other software requirements methods in insisting that:

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