Workshops

Four workshops will be held on Monday-Tuesday 15-16th October in conjunction with RE’07.

The following workshops have been cancelled: SOCCER, SREP and CSDRE. Delegates who have registered can either transfer to another workshop or request a refund when they arrive at the conference.

For submitting to the workshops (call for papers, submission procedure, etc.) please see the respective workshop website.

CERE Comparative Evaluation in RE, theory, methods, empirical studies
CSDRE (cancelled!) Computer-Supported Distributed RE, globalisation, offshore RE
REET Requirements Engineering Education and Training
REV RE Visualization of models, process, domains
RHAS Requirements for High-Availability Systems, safety critical, complex engineering applications
SOCCER (cancelled!) Service-Oriented Computing: Consequences for RE, reuse, web services
SREP (cancelled!) Situational RE Processes: Tailoring RE Processes to the Global Context

Provisional workshop dates (likely to change):
   Monday, October 15: REET, REV, RHAS
   Tuesday, October 16: CERE

 

CERE'07: Fifth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering
   Ann Hickey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA
   Pete Sawyer, Lancaster University, UK
   Thomas Alspaugh, University of California, Irvine, USA

The need to assess the effectiveness and impact of RE research is widely accepted within the RE community. The 2003 - 2006 CERE workshops championed empirical evaluation of RE research by promoting the comparative evaluations of alternative RE techniques. In this CERE workshop we will investigate CERE’s traditional themes of RE research methods and validation, comparative evaluation in RE and the role of theory in guiding comparative evaluation. We seek papers in all these areas, especially reports of empirical studies and comparative evaluations of RE techniques, methods and tools. One of our specific goals in CERE’07, however, is to assess how far the discipline has come during CERE’s lifetime. We will be keen to see if we are able to evaluate the extent to which the CERE community’s efforts to make the use of comparative evidence routinely used in RE have been a success. We can measure success both in terms of how embedded the ideas have become in the RE community, and the extent to which these ideas are improving RE research and practice.

CERE'07 will include a keynote address by Professor Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto, and a mix of presentations of results from current research with discussion of next steps, along with retrospective looks at how far we’ve come. Building on the advances achieved in earlier CERE workshops, CERE’07 will seek to further build a community initiative in shaping future directions for RE research and comparative evaluation.

Note: Researchers interested in empirical evaluation may also be interested in the Empirical Research Methods in RE Tutorial offered by Professor Easterbrook on Monday, October 15th, which will be an excellent complement to this workshop. 

workshop website http://www.di.unipi.it/CERE07

 

 

CSDRE'07: Computer-Supported Distributed RE, globalisation, offshore RE (cancelled!)
   Daniela Damian, University of Victoria
   Bikram Sengupta, IBM India Research Lab
   Irwin Kwan, University of Victoria
   Sabrina Marczak, University of Victoria

In Global Software Development (GSD), multiple stakeholders must collaborate and coordinate to build computer-based systems. These stakeholders must communicate with each other for requirements negotiation, development, verification, and validation in software. However, the increased distances, in addition to time-zone issues and cultural differences, make timely communication difficult, which opens opportunities for new processes and new tools that allow these stakeholders to connect better. The objective of the International Workshop on Computer-Supported Distributed Requirements Engineering (CSDRE) is to demonstrate how computer-based tools are used in requirements engineering. These tools may be brand-new tools of the future, or innovative uses of existing technology. This workshop aims to identify the current state-of-the-practice in CSDRE, and to identify a research agenda that includes the major topics of interest to practitioners and which represent potential research directions.

workshop website http://csdre2007.segal.uvic.ca

 

 

REET'07: Requirements Engineering Education and Training
   Didar Zowghi, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
   Vincenzo Gervasi, University of Pisa, Italy
   Jane Cleland-Huang, DePaul University, USA.

Effective Requirements Engineering (RE) is increasingly recognized as a critical component in the success of a software development project.  This has led to a growing identification of the importance of incorporating significant RE components into the curriculum of university degrees in Software Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology and other related areas.  Furthermore many industrial organizations are recognizing the need to develop RE related training programs as part of their ongoing process improvement initiatives. Following the success of the first International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Education and Training (REET 2005), this workshop will address issues related to RE education, both as part of a formal university degree and as ongoing skills training within the workplace.  The workshop is intended to go much deeper than a surface discussion of curriculum issues and will examine specific ideas and techniques for teaching skills needed by an effective requirements engineer. In addition to topics related to curriculum development, creative contributions related to pedagogical techniques for teaching RE skills are strongly encouraged. These skills include requirements elicitation, modeling, analysis, conflict negotiation, consensus building, and requirements specification writing and reviewing skills. Submissions could take the form of experience reports or demonstrations of specific teaching techniques and training materials.

workshop website http://re.cti.depaul.edu/REET07/

 

REV'07: Second International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Visualization
  Brian Berenbach, Siemens Corporate Research
  Olly Gotel, Pace University

With the increasing complexity of software requirements, problems of traditional requirements engineering techniques, including the use of unstructured text and lists, are becoming increasingly apparent. This workshop aims to provide a collaborative session in which ideas related to visualization of requirements and ways of making them practical are shared, reviewed and debated. The workshop will be used to identify future work, issues, problems and priorities, and to propose recommendations around these dimensions for requirements visualization research.

workshop website http://csis.pace.edu/~ogotel/professional/REV07.html

 

 

RHAS’07: Sixth International Workshop on  Requirements for High-Assurance Systems
   Donald Firesmith, Software Engineering Institute, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

The Sixth International Requirements Engineering for High-Assurance Systems Workshop (RHAS 2007 - Delhi) is a one-day workshop that addresses the special challenges of engineering the requirements of software-intensive systems, the performance and dependability (i.e., defensibility and soundness) of which are mission critical. For such systems, it is thus critically important that requirements engineers collaborate with specialty engineers to properly engineer both:

Position papers will be submitted and reviewed prior to the conference, and published for the conference if accepted. During the morning of the workshops, authors of accepted position papers will present a brief summary of their papers. During the afternoon of the workshop, the attendees will work in a collaborative setting to:

workshop website http://www.sei.cmu.edu/community/rhas-workshop/

 

 

SOCCER'07: 3rd International Workshop on Service-Oriented Computing Consequences for Engineering Requirements (cancelled!)
   Luciano Baresi, Italy
   Neil Maiden, UK
   Klaus Pohl, Germany

The objective of this workshop is to host significant and high-quality contributions in all topics related to requirements engineering for service-oriented software, with the goal of letting participants gain insights into the current state of the art and future challenges, create synergies through integration, and foster cross-cooperation. Besides building a community, the main result will be the continued development of a research agenda to guide and support researchers in the field.

Software-based systems are changing. There is increasing interest in autonomic and self-* systems that are dynamic and flexibility based on new capabilities to self-reconfigure and self-resolve anomalous situations. Currently these capabilities are delivered using services, and in particular web services, using a service-oriented approach. Web services are the natural evolution of conventional middleware technologies to support Web-based and enterprise-level integration, but the paradigm can also serve as basis for other classes of systems. For example, it can be applied to support all systems which require a high degree of flexibility and dynamism to discover available functionality at run-time and to negotiate its quality parameters dynamically. This is the case, for example, for ambient computing and automotive applications that need to cope with changing (evolving) configurations. The dynamic nature of these systems precludes the a-priori identification of the components that define the system and demands for the run-time discovery and composition of such services. To realize a service-oriented architecture we need techniques to identify and specify requirements on services in a machine-interpretable way to enable the dynamic composition and deployment of systems that meet the expectations of the different stakeholders. We need new capabilities to monitor the behavior of deployed systems and reasoning on partial matches, deviations, and corrective actions. We need to be able to exploit the availability of services to discover new opportunities that improve existing requirements processes and techniques. And finally we need to able to configure systems from different types of services, including web services, software components and hybrid services that include human intervention. The workshop will enable communities that work on requirements and service-oriented applications to meet together and share their knowledge to set appropriate theoretical foundations, define special-purpose methodologies for requirements elicitation, and develop supporting technology. The workshop also aims at promoting research directions on requirements engineering for the class of applications that require autonomic and self-managing systems.

workshop website http://www.elet.polimi.it/upload/baresi/SOCCER07/

 

 

SREP’07 - The Second International Workshop on Situational Requirements Engineering Processes: Tailoring Requirements Engineering Processes to the Global Context (cancelled!)
   Dr Pär J Ågerfalk, Jönköping International Business School
   Dr Norah Power, University of Limerick
   Dr Jolita Ralyté, University of Geneva

The impact of ‘situation’ on requirements engineering is undeniable. Every situation is different, but we should still try to find aspects of situations or project characteristics that make a difference to the requirements engineering process. One current characteristic of particular importance is the setting known as offshoring or global software development. Another one is implied by the growing recognition of the open source software development model as a viable approach also in commercial contexts. As a consequence, many development projects require specific RE methods and tools to support distributed and possibly open RE processes. The question then, is how to select, adapt or construct, and manage (perhaps changing) requirements on an RE process that best suits the situation of the project at hand.

workshop website http://cui.unige.ch/db-research/SREP07/

 

 

More Information

For more information on RE'07 workshops in general contact Workshop Chairs Camille Salinesi and Naveen Prakash.

The original call for workshop proposals is accessible here.