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Rational expert: Dr. Keith Collyer

Keith Collyer Dr. Keith Collyer is an IBM Rational thought leader with over 30 years developing and delivering systems and software and assisting organizations with process improvement and requirements management in a wide range of organizations.

After graduating as an electronics engineer, he gained a Ph.D. in Engineering Mathematics and worked on high voltage control systems before moving into advanced software development, including artificial intelligence and object-oriented development. His interest in the “people” aspects of development led him into project management, quality assurance and processes, never losing sight of the need to develop systems that meet real needs

Keith has successfully introduced quality systems into several organizations, ranging from a small defense consultancy to household name multi-nationals.

Keith is an experienced Systems Engineer, with extensive industrial experience of the specification and development of complex systems. He is particularly skilled in all aspects of requirements management and requirements engineering.

As a consultant Keith concentrated on helping organizations large and small to introduce requirements management processes and systems. The key aspects of this work were ensuring that the client understood the needs for and benefits from requirements management, clarifying (and in some cases defining) with the client the processes involved, including the necessary information and inter-relationships, and defining a DOORS® implementation to best support the client’s needs.

He is a co-author (leading on Requirements Management) of the IBM Rational Harmony™ for IT Software (Harmony/ITSW) process; the other members of the Harmony process family reuse most of the requirements principles and processes. He is the lead author of many of the former Telelogic requirements process and tool training courses.

In his current role at IBM, he works within the Requirements and Quality Management Product Delivery Team on defining the place of requirements within the overall systems development process. He advises on product strategy in this context. He delivers seminars on requirements management for public events, to IBM customers and internally within IBM and provides training in the application of IBM’s requirements management tools to IBM’s own professional service engineers and application engineers, R&D, sales, and marketing.

He is a member of the Institution of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, International Council on Systems Engineering and International Institute of Business Analysts.

Publications

Keith has written many internally published and external publications, a selection of the external material includes:

[1] K.A. Collyer and T. Hamazaki, “AI-based factory scheduling applications,” Research and Development in Expert Systems VIII, London: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 244-252.

[2] K. Collyer, “Putting Requirements First,” Classification of Requirements, Integration of Requirements and Models, Requirements Engineering Process, Munich: Technical University of Munich, 2002.

[3] K. Collyer and J. Dick, “Traceability of Requirements Throughout the Life Cycle,” Validating Pharmaceutical Systems, John Andrews, ed., CRC Press / Sue Horwood Publishing, 2006, pp. 209-224.

[4] K. Collyer, “Use of Objects for Rapid Application Development,” Proc. of Using Objects for RAD: A business and Industrial Perspective, Uxbridge UK: Unicom Seminars, 1996.

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