About Square Root

Square Root was one of five studio teams from the 2009 class of Master of Software Engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University. Throughout our project we experimented with various software engineering methods and practices while working to complete a web-based security requirements elicitation and analysis tool based on the SQUARE process.

This blog is a comprehensive reflection of the time we spent working on the project - what we learned, what we thought, what we did, what we liked, what we didn't like, what "software engineering" means to us. Please ask questions or leave comments and don't hesitate to link freely to our posts. A complete archive of our project has been created as well.

SQUARE stands for Security QUAlity Requirements Engineering. There are nine steps in the SQUARE process:

1. Agree on definition of terms


2. Identify safety, security, and privacy goals


3. Develop artifacts


4. Perform risk assessment


5. Select requirements elicitation technique


6. Elicit security requirements


7. Categorize security requirements


8. Prioritize security requirements


9. Inspect security requirements

Nancy Mead is the principal investigator for SQUARE. You can read more about SQUARE on the SEI website.

The Square Root team consists of:

• Abin Shahab


• Marco Len


• Michael Keeling


• Loomi Liao


• Sneader Sequeira

Our studio mentors throughout the project were Dave Root, John Robert, Licinio Roque, and Paulo Rupino.

The team, from left to right: Loomi, Abin, Sneader, Michael, Marco