More introductions to the people behind Digirail! This time, we are introducing Pekka Mäkinen, a specialist in requirements engineering.
How long have you been working on the project? How did you end up with Digirail?
I joined Fintraffic Railway in August 2023 as a specialist in requirements engineering. I currently split my time between developing Fintraffic Railway’s internal requirements management and working on Digirail activities in the alliance project run by Fintraffic and the Finnish Transport Infrastructure Agency.
I’d previously spent about a year working with requirements management for Digirail, and this position at Fintraffic Railway offered broader scope for both learning more and further developing the field. It’s an amusing coincidence that I started my career with a summer job as a temporary platform attendant for the Finnish state railways back in the early eighties, and now I’ve come full circle.
What do you find most interesting about the project?
The most interesting aspect of this job is that requirements engineering forms the foundation for everything – development, design and quality management – and especially in safety-critical sectors. Digirail revolves around requirements engineering, as in addition to upgrading Finland’s railway network, the project’s outputs will be the system design, requirements and compliant implementation required for the upgrade.
The Digirail project’s scope and forward-looking perspective also interest me personally, as well as the challenges these bring to requirements engineering or quality management in general.
What are your hobbies? How do you spend your free time?
I spend most of my free time on music (passive listening and collecting records) and books (reading and collecting scientific literature). I usually travel during my holidays. Italy is one of my favourite destinations, and this also ties in with another one of my hobbies – good food and wine.