Seminar • Software Engineering • The Three Horizons of Digital Design: From Vision to Ready-to-Code-Modeling of Requirements

Wednesday, August 23, 2023 10:00 am - 11:30 am EDT (GMT -04:00)

Please note: This seminar will take place in DC 2310  DC 1331.

Martina Beck, PhD
CEO, MaibornWolff, Munich, Germany

As a real-world IT service provider, we have really struggled to sell requirements engineering since agilization. Everything is about Scrum teams and coding for our customers. At the same time, holistic design is sorely needed.

What also stood in our way in practice was the myth of the solution-neutral requirement. For a long time it was preached that the “what?” and the “how?” of an IT solution should be considered separately. In a world of increasing technology diversity, this is not feasible in practice. Requirements engineers also need technology knowledge to design a good digital solution.

With our expertise in the early phases of IT projects, we now rely on the concepts and skills of digital design. We invented the three-horizon model to make the conception and design activity tangible and understandable for us and our customers.

I will show the model of the three horizons of digital design and address the different levels of design in the context of an IT project. Shaping – Exploring – Implementing are the levels at which requirements engineering takes place in the agile world.


Bio: Dr. Martina Beck has been building bridges between business and IT for over 25 years. She is a passionate digital designer. Inspiring IT solutions are her goal. She loves to ask her customers the right questions and to think her way into digital matters.

Her interdisciplinary studies in linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Computer Science at the Faculty of Technology prepared the ground to bring different worlds together. During her PhD she worked for 5 years as the Chair of Programming Languages and Compiler Construction. For a long time, Martina Beck was division manager for Digital Design & Engineering. Today she is managing director at MaibornWolff.