REFSQ Conference

Early Bird Deadline approaching: Feb-26!

Call for Participation

REFSQ’16 will take place from March 14 -17, 2016 in Gothenburg, Sweden!
The REFSQ’16 special theme is:

Understanding an ever changing world through the right requirements.

Keynote Speakers

• Magne Jørgenssen, Simula Norway
• Roel Wieringa, University of Twente, the Netherlands

Scientific Program

21 papers will be intensively discussed in the REFSQ typical discussion sessions.

3 workshops featuring the topics of:

• Continuous Requirements Engineering
• Requirements Engineering for Self-Adaptive and cyber Physical Systems
• Requirements Engineering and Testing

Doctoral Symposium

Posters & Demos Session

Industry Track

Keynote: Sarah Gregory, Intel, USA

7 Industrial Talks and a Discussion Panel

Research Methodology Track

This track features lively discussions giving you the opportunity to learn about research methods used in RE research.

Social Event

Join us for join us for an unforgettable social Event on March 16, including a guided tour in Universeum, Gothenburg’s famous science park, and a delicious conference dinner in its aquarium.

The detailed program is available at: https://refsq.org/2016/conference-program/

The online registration service is available at: https://refsq.org/2016/event-information/registration/

Requirements Workshop

This is a summary of the SEEC workshop on Requirements Engineering on Dec 3rd, 2015.

REFSQ conference is coming to Gothenburg in March 2016. This is very good news, since this is a very strong international Requirements Engineering conference with a particular focus on bringing together industry and academia.

In preparation of this event, the Program Committee met in early December to make decisions about the scientific program (the industry program is rapidly evolving, with new speakers getting confirmed every other week now). We took the opportunity and invited those international experts to give talks in the SEEC workshop series.

Slides from the presentations have been added to the agenda: Requirements Engineering Workshop

Sadly, the workshop did collide with the Software Center Reporting workshop. Thus, many of you did not have a chance to participate. Nevertheless, a huge interest in the topic was indicated and we had 15 participants – enough encouragement for the main conference in March 2016 and further SEEC workshops around a similar topic complex in 2016.

The Role of RE in Agile

This is a belated summary of our discussions at the SEEC Workshop on Do we still need requirements? On the Role of RE in Agile in March 2015. If you find any material missing, please let me know!

Summary

In this SEEC Workshop, we (29 participants from industry and practice) discussed whether we still need requirements in an agile world. My (Eric‘s) view is of course a bit biased here, but in a way the answer depends of course on how to define things like requirements or requirements engineering.

We have seen a strong case, where low level requirements can be omitted by using extensive unit testing instead. A good vision, e.g. on level of plan items or user stories should be in place then (and well communicated).

For me, a requirement can be an abstract entity, which is implied by and discussed in the scope of a user story. After the discussion, I felt that all participants agree that this kind of knowledge should be captured, documented, and managed. In what way will necessarily differ on the context, but I hope for more discussions on this topic, e.g. in a new SEEC Workshop.

Material from Eric

Slides from workshop

References

1. Ulf Eliasson, Rogardt Heldal, Eric Knauss, Patrizio Pelliccione. The Need of Complementing Plan-Driven Requirements Engineering with Emerging Communication: Experiences from Volvo Car Group. 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference, Ottawa, Canada. 2015
2. Irum Inayata, Siti Salwah Salim, Sabrina Marczak, Maya Daneva, Shahaboddin Shamshirband. A systematic literature review on agile requirements engineering practices and challenges. In Computers in Human Behavior, Vol. 51 (B), pg. 915–929, 2015
3. Eric Knauss, Daniela Damian, Alessia Knauss, and Arber Borici. Openness and Requirements: Opportunities and Tradeoffs in Software Ecosystems. In Proceedings of 22nd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ’14), pages 213-222, Karlskrona, Sweden, 2014.
4. Eric Knauss and Daniela Damian. Towards Enabling Cross-Organizational Modeling in Automotive Ecosystems. In Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Model-Driven Development Processes and Practices (MD2P2 ’14), Valencia, Spain, 2014.

Material from Baldvin

• Success_without_Requirements_Engineering
• An_empirical_investigation_of_the_requirements_process_at_a_successful_company

Bonus material

Baldvin mentioned a master thesis which focuses on the platform part of Axis’ organization, while his talk was more focused on the product part. But there are many similarities.

Here you can find a “easy to read” summary of the thesis (in Swedish):

http://www.lth.se/fileadmin/cs/Examensarbete/Program/program_140528.pdf

And here is a talk from the thesis supervisor about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nz_FSpNW-wk

Requirements Monitoring in Systems of Systems

Speaker: Paul Grünbacher

Workshop: Requirements Engineering (REFSQ Mini Workshop)

Abstract: Many software systems today can be characterized as systems of systems (SoS) comprising interrelated and heterogeneous systems. Due to their scale, complexity, and heterogeneity engineers face significant challenges when determining the compliance of SoS with their requirements. Requirements monitoring approaches are a promising solution for checking system properties at runtime. This talk will describe a requirements monitoring approach for SoS providing the following characteristics: it uses a DSL-based approach for defining and monitoring requirements; it allows modeling the monitoring scopes of requirements with respect to the SoS architecture; it employs event models to abstract from different technologies and systems to be monitored; and it discovers violations of requirements at runtime across different levels and systems. The talk will also report experiences of applying the approach to a real-world SoS of an industrial partner in the domain of industrial automation.

References:

M. Vierhauser, R. Rabiser, P. Grünbacher, and A. Egyed, “Developing a DSL-Based Approach for Event-Based Monitoring of Systems of Systems: Experiences and Lessons Learned,“ 30th IEEE/ACM International Conference Automated Software Engineering, Lincoln, Nebraska, USA, 2015.

M. Vierhauser, R. Rabiser, P. Grünbacher, K. Seyerlehner, S. Wallner, and H. Zeisel, “ReMinds: A Flexible Runtime Monitoring Framework for Systems of Systems,” Journal of Systems and Software, 2015

Paul Grünbacher

Paul Grünbacher is an Associate Professor at the Institute for Software Systems Engineering at Johannes Kepler Universität Linz (Austria). He is the head of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Monitoring and Evolution of Very-Large-Scale Software Systems, a 7-year research project co-funded by industrial partners. Paul’s research interests include software product lines, model-based development and evolution, requirements engineering, and value-based software engineering. He has published more than 100 papers in international peer-reviewed journals, conferences, and workshops. Paul is an Editorial Board Member of the Elsevier Journal on Information and Software Technology. He is regularly serving as a reviewer for international journals and conferences. He is member of ACM, ACM SIGSOFT, the IEEE CS, the Austrian Computer Society, and Euromicro. Link to Paul’s homepage.

SEEC-Talk: Dec-3rd, 2015: Requirements Monitoring in Systems of Systems  in the Special SEEC Workshop together with REFSQ 2016 PC Meeting on Requirements Engineering.

Anna Perini

Anna Perini is a senior researcher at the Software Engineering research unit of FBK ICT – Center for Information Technology, Trento (Italy), where she conducts research in requirements engineering. She is project coordinator of the H2020 project SUPERSEDE, and of the joint programme FBK-ICT and CNR-ISTC, on Ontology-Based Information Systems (OBIS).  
Her research interests include: collaborative, distributed requirements engineering, requirements engineering for adaptive software, regulatory compliance, and empirical studies in software engineering. She gave substantial contribution to the development of the agent-oriented software engineering methodology Tropos.
She served in the program committees of many Int. Workshops and Conferences, among which RE, REFSQ, ICSE-NIER, SEAMS, AOSE, AAMAS, and regularly reviews papers for significant journals in the Software Engineering area including TSE, and JRE. Link to Anna’s homepage.

SEEC-Talk: Dec-3rd, 2015: The SUPERSEDE project  in the Special SEEC Workshop together with REFSQ 2016 PC Meeting on Requirements Engineering.

Hermann Kaindl

Hermann Kaindl is the director of the institute for computer technology and a member of the senate at TU Wien. He joined this institute in early 2003 as a full professor. Prior to moving to academia, he was a senior consultant with the division of program and systems engineering at Siemens AG Austria. There he has gained more than 24 years of industrial experience in software development. His current research interests include software and systems engineering focusing on requirements engineering and architecting, and human-computer interaction as it relates to interaction design and automated generation of user interfaces. He has published 5 books and more than 200 refereed papers in journals, books and conference proceedings. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE, a Distinguished Scientist member of the ACM, Fellow of the IARIA and a member of the AAAI, and is on the executive board of the Austrian Society for Artificial Intelligence. Link to Hermann’s homepage.

SEEC-Talk: Dec-3rd, 2015: Combining Requirements and Interaction Design in the Special SEEC Workshop together with REFSQ 2016 PC Meeting on Requirements Engineering.

Jennifer Horkoff

Dr. Jennifer Horkoff is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the CAS Business School, City University, London.  She is the holder of a two-year Marie Sklodowska Curie Intra-European Fellowships for career development (IEF), working under the supervision of Prof. Neil Maiden.  She is also a holder of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship.  Jennifer received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, under the supervision of Prof. Eric Yu.  She spent 2.5 years at the University of Trento, Italy, as part of the Lucretius: Foundations for Software Evolution project, working with Prof. John Mylopoulos and colleagues. She has been an author or co-author of more than 20 papers in peer-reviewed journals, conferences, or workshops. Her research interests lie in enhancing the use of conceptual modeling for requirements engineering and business analysis, focusing on creativity, interactive analysis, uncertainty, scalability, and the application of RE-inspired conceptual modeling to business intelligence. Jennifer is on the program committee of several international conferences, including RE, REFSQ and CAiSE, has been on the organizing committee of RE, and has been a (co-)organizer of several workshops, including iStar, RIGiM, and MReBA. Link to Jennifer’s homepage.

SEEC-Talk: Dec-3rd, 2015: Creativity and goal Modeling for Requirements Engineering in the Special SEEC Workshop together with REFSQ 2016 PC Meeting on Requirements Engineering.

Requirements Engineering Workshop: 4th Speaker confirmed

Happy to announce that Jennifer Horkoff is confirmed as an additional speaker to the upcoming requirements engineering workshop on Dec-3. She will talk about Creativity and Goal Modeling for Requirements Engineering.

Requirements Engineering Workshop

What:	Requirements Engineering Workshop with International Experts from REFSQ Program Committee
When:	2015-12-03, 13:00 – 16:00
Where:	Room Svea118, Lindholmen, Gothenburg, Sweden

REFSQ conference is coming to Gothenburg in March 2016. This is very good news, since this is a very strong international Requirements Engineering conference with a particular focus on bringing together industry and academia.

In preparation of this event, the Program Committee will meet in early December to make decisions about the scientific program (the industry program is rapidly evolving, with new speakers getting confirmed every other week now).

As a side effect, many of the best international researchers in Requirements Engineering are coming to Gothenburg already in December! We should not miss the chance to hear them talk and discuss with them on December 3rd in the scope of the Software Engineering Experience Circle.

Preliminary Agenda:

Update: Jennifer Horkoff confirmed as 4th speaker.

13:00 – 13:05	Opening
13:05 – 13:45	Hermann Kaindl: “Combining Requirements and Interaction Design” (Slides)
13:45 – 14:30	Anna Perini: “The SUPERSEDE project”
14:30 – 14:45	Coffee break
14:45 – 15.25	Paul Gruenbacher: “Requirements Monitoring in Systems of Systems”
15:25 – 16.10	Jennifer Horkoff: “Creativity and goal Modeling for Requirements Engineering” (Slides)

Participation

Participation in this event is free. Please consider signing up for planning reasons this registration form.