Feature Disambiguation

Pamela ZAVE

AT&T Laboratories—Research, Florham Park, New Jersey, USA
pamela@research.att.com

Abstract. This essay proposes the related goals of discovering user-level telecommunication requirements and making telecommunication features unambiguous with respect to user-level concepts such as roles and purposes. It also offers a preliminary list of techniques for feature disambiguation.

Biography. Pamela Zave received the A.B. degree in English from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, and the Ph.D. degree in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin--Madison. She began her career as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park. Since 1981 she has been with AT&T Research, and is now a Technology Advisor in the Network Services Research Laboratory.

Dr. Zave has approximately 70 publications, of which "A Compositional Approach to Multiparadigm Programming" won the Best Paper of 1989 award from IEEE Software. She also has two patents and two patents pending in the telecommunication area. She has given numerous talks all over the world, including invited lectures at 20 conferences. She is a member of IFIP Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology) and IFIP Working Group 2.9 (Requirements Engineering).

Dr. Zave is an associate editor of Requirements Engineering, a former associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering , a former associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, and a former officer of the ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering. She served as a guest editor of the January 1986 special issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering on software design methods. She has served on the program committees of many conferences, including chairing the program committee of the Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, and co-chairing the program committee of Formal Methods Europe 2001.