6:00-6:30 PM:

Meet, Greet, and Mingle

Local Introductions at Local Sites

Eat Dinner

6:30-7:00 PM: INCOSE Overview and Chapter Business

7:00-7:45 PM: Invited Speaker: Amar Zabarah

7:45-8:00 PM: Discussion and Wrap-Up

Abstract
Poor requirements have long been a problem across both industry and the federal government. Requirements engineers, business analysts, and estimators often face the challenge of parsing through hundreds and sometimes thousands of requirements in an effort to define system design needs or to accurately estimate the software development cost. This detail-oriented and often grueling process requires analysts to be highly experienced and also have a tremendous amount of tolerance for repetitive requirements parsing—and despite even the most meticulous analysis, mistakes are still an inevitability.
With artificial intelligence (AI), machines are now capable of “learning” processes and automating previously human-dependent functions. AI can serve to aid analysts in the understanding and parsing of requirements by identifying duplication in both language and meaning, and dramatically reducing the time and effort necessary to accurately analyze projects. Breakthroughs in AI, such as natural language processing (NLP), is making it possible to perform some requirements analysis.
This briefing provides an overview of Machine Assisted Requirements Inspection and Evaluation (MARINE) that automates requirements analysis and functional software size estimation by applying AI and NLP techniques to review the quality of software requirements, identifies key words and objects to provide useful information, and then applying the FP counting process to them. MARINE is developed in Python, and it is a desktop application that interfaces with Office software.

About the speaker:
Amar Zabarah has more than 10 years of Systems Engineering, Research and Development (R&D), and Operations Research (OR) experience in gathering, defining, and structuring requirements of systems for clients' needs; identifying and designing processes; developing program estimates; building project schedules, budgets, forecasts, and plans; conducting detailed system analyses; and providing acquisition recommendations.  Mr. Zabarah has worked in commercial and federal settings, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, Administrative Office of the US Courts (AOUSC), Internal Revenue Services (IRS) and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (OUSD). Mr. Zabarah was a co-speaker on a “Model Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) Business Case Considerations - An Enabler of Risk Reduction” during the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA) - 14th Annual Systems Engineering Conference October 2008. Mr. Zabarah holds a BS in Systems Engineering and MS in Operations Research from George Mason University.

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