****************REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER******************** No. 24. Contents !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1. !CFP RE95: Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering! !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 2. RE95 Paper Classification Scheme (Pamela Zave) 3. Bibliography on Scenarios in Requirements Engineering (Andrew Blyth) 4. CFP Requirements Elicitation for Software-based Systems (Pearl Brereton) If you have questions about particular items appearing in the newsletter - send them to the originators. If you wish to contribute send your material to: re-list@doc.ic.ac.uk (will be moderated). Subscription or Removal requests should be sent to: re-request@doc.ic.ac.uk Back issues can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp-host: dse.doc.ic.ac.uk (IP number: 146.169.2.20). Directory: requirements. Files are called renl1, renl2, etc. If you cannot use ftp then you can get any back issues using email. Send email containing the following to ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk open dse.doc.ic.ac.uk cd requirements get quit The Requirements Engineering Newsletter and its archive is also accessible through WWW. The URL is: http://web.doc.ic.ac.uk/req-eng/index.html You may wish to link any Internet software engineering information resource you maintain to this and/or notify the manager of your local Web server by passing this message on to them. If you wish your requirements or software engineering ftp archive to be linked to the RE Newsletter archive please inform me. If you are unfamiliar with WWW you may wish to obtain a copy of the Mosaic public domain internet browser which is available for X-Windows, Macintosh or Microsoft Windows. The RE Newsletter can be conveniently accessed through the Imperial College, Department of Computing, United Kingdom, WWW Home Page (http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/). Requirements Engineering Newsletter is published solely as an educational service. Copyright (c) 1994, Anthony Finkelstein; All Rights Reserved. ********************************************************************** From: pamela@research.att.com (Pamela Zave) Subject: RE95 CFP CALL FOR PAPERS Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE95) 27-29 March 1995 York, England Sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society In cooperation with ACM SIGSOFT, IFIP Working Group 2.9 (Software Requirements Engineering) Requirements engineering is the branch of software engineering concerned with the real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on software systems. It is also concerned with the relationship of these factors to precise specifications of software behavior, and to their evolution over time and across software families. This symposium, to be held near the beautiful medieval city of York, will bring together researchers and practitioners of requirements engineering for an exchange of ideas and experience. The program will consist of invited talks, paper presentations, panels, working groups, demonstrations, and a doctoral consortium. INFORMATION FOR AUTHORS Papers on all aspects of requirements engineering are welcome. However, all submitted papers must be classified according to the problems they are addressing and the contributions they are making toward solving them. The official classification scheme for the symposium can be obtained by requesting it from the program chair or by anonymous FTP from host research.att.com (/dist/re95.cfp). Papers will be evaluated according to criteria appropriate for their classifications. We encourage prospective authors to look at the classification scheme early, as it establishes a uniform context and may thus influence the presentation of their work. Authors must submit six copies of each full paper (no E-mail or FAX submissions) to the program chair. Papers should not exceed 6,000 words in length, and should be accompanied by full contact information including name, address, E-mail address, telephone number, and FAX number. Authors are also requested to submit the title, abstract, and classifications of each paper by E-mail to the program chair a month before the full paper is due (please include full contact information). All accepted papers will appear in the proceedings of the symposium, to be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press. The best papers will also be considered for publication in a major software-engineering journal. Important dates: 1 August 1994, title, abstract, and classifications requested; 1 September 1994, full papers due; 1 November 1994, notification of acceptance; 15 December 1994, camera-ready copy due. INFORMATION FOR DOCTORAL STUDENTS In the doctoral consortium, students will present their work-in-progress to selected senior members of the requirements-engineering community, for the purposes of feedback and discussion. Presenters will be selected on the basis of a research summary, not exceeding 2,000 words in length. The reports of presenters will be published as notes for consortium participants. Limited financial assistance will be available for presenters. Doctoral students should contact the consortium chair for details. INFORMATION FOR POTENTIAL DEMONSTRATORS The symposium will provide free facilities for demonstration of selected tools. Potential demonstrators should submit a description of their tool, not to exceed 500 words, to the general chair by 1 September 1994. RE `95 COMMITTEE General Chair: Michael Harrison Social Events Chair: Peter Wright Publicity Chair: Laurence Brooks Local Arrangements Chair: Chris Johnson Finance Chair : Jonathan Moffett all at: Department of Computer Science University of York York YO1 5DD, UK (44) 904 432721; FAX (44) 904 432767 re95@minster.york.ac.uk Program Chair: Pamela Zave AT&T Bell Laboratories Room 2B-413 Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974 USA (1) 908 582 3080; FAX (1) 908 582 7550 pamela@research.att.com Doctoral Consortium Chair: Anthony Finkelstein Department of Computing Imperial College 180 Queens Gate London SW7 2BZ UK (44) 71 589 5111 x5078; FAX (44) 71 581 8024 acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk Program Committee: William Agresti, MITRE (USA) Mack Alford, Ascent Logic (USA) Mark Ardis, AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA) Andre Arnold, Universite de Bordeaux (France) Joanne Atlee, University of Waterloo (Canada) David Barstow, Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer Science (France) Janis Bubenko, Swedish Institute for Systems Development (Sweden) Alan Davis, University of Colorado (USA) Martin Feather, USC Information Sciences Institute (USA) Stephen Fickas, University of Oregon (USA) David Garlan, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) Joseph Goguen, University of Oxford (UK) Sol Greenspan, GTE Laboratories (USA) Anthony Hall, Praxis Systems (UK) Ian Hayes, University of Queensland (Australia) Hisayuki Horai, Fujitsu Laboratories (Japan) Daniel Jackson, Carnegie Mellon University (USA) Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen (Germany) Lalita Jategaonkar Jagadeesan, AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA) Lewis Johnson, USC Information Sciences Institute (USA) Julio Cesar Leite, PUC-Rio (Brazil) Robyn Lutz, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA) Tom Maibaum, Imperial College (UK) John McDermid, University of York (UK) John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto (Canada) Colin Potts, Georgia Institute of Technology (USA) Howard Reubenstein, MITRE (USA) Dieter Rombach, Universitaet Kaiserslautern (Germany) Kevin Ryan, University of Limerick (Ireland) Jawed Siddiqi, Sheffield Hallam University (UK) Alistair Sutcliffe, City University of London (UK) Axel van Lamsweerde, Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium) Kiem-Phong Vo, AT&T Bell Laboratories (USA) Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, Digitalk (USA) ********************************************************************** From: pamela@research.att.com (Pamela Zave) Subject: RE95 Paper Classification Scheme Second IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering OFFICIAL SYMPOSIUM CLASSIFICATION SCHEME FOR SUBMITTED PAPERS PROBLEMS OF REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING Research in requirements engineering can be classified according to the problem(s) being attacked. Note that a problem is different from a requirements-engineering task such as elicitation or specification, because not all tasks are problematic, and some problems affect many tasks. 1. Problems of investigating the goals, functions, and constraints of a software system 1.1. Identifying client groups and interests 1.2. Overcoming barriers to communication 1.3. Converting vague goals (e.g., "user-friendliness," "security") into specific properties 1.4. Allocating requirements to the software component of a broader system 1.5. Understanding priorities and ranges of satisfaction 1.6. Estimating costs, risks, and schedules 1.7. Ensuring completeness 2. Problems of translating goals, functions, and constraints into specifications of software system behavior 2.1. Generating and evaluating alternative strategies for meeting requirements 2.2. Integrating multiple views and representations 2.3. Engineering trade-offs and optimizations 2.4. Obtaining complete, consistent, and comprehensible specifications 2.5. Checking that the specified system will satisfy its goals, functional needs, and constraints 2.6. Obtaining specifications that are well-suited for design and implementation activities 3. Problems of managing evolution 3.1. Ensuring that the results of requirements engineering are modifiable and maintainable 3.2. Extending or improving ill-structured systems 3.3. Identifying and exploiting the common characteristics of a family of systems 3.4. Reusing the artifacts of requirements engineering 4. Other (please specify) CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOLUTIONS IN REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING Research in requirements engineering can also be classified according to its contribution(s) to a solution. Note the implicit assumption that, as software engineers, we can seek to understand social factors but we can only hope to influence technical practices. A. Report on the state of practice B. Analysis of cultural, political, organizational, and economic factors relevant to a problem C. Proposed process-oriented solution (an orderly method for making decisions or accomplishing a task) D. Proposed product-oriented solution (focusing on the representations used and produced by tasks, and algorithmic manipulations of these representations) E. Case study applying a proposed solution to a substantial example (for the purpose of gaining experience and preparing for a more systematic evaluation) F. Evaluation or comparison of proposed solutions G. Other (please specify) EXAMPLES ...A paper on prototyping user interfaces would be labeled 1.2 (because it is addressing the problem of how to make a system user-friendly) and D or C (depending on whether the paper shows how to construct such prototypes easily or how to use experimentation to design user-friendly interfaces, respectively). ...A paper on automated support for reverse engineering of requirements would be labeled D (because the algorithm must be representation-dependent) and 3.2 (the system must be ill-structured or the requirements would already be available; there must be a need to change the system or the effort would be unnecessary). ...A paper on writing specifications so that aspects of system behavior can be traced to their origins in goals and constraints would be labeled D and 3.1 (because the purpose of traceability is to ensure that important requirements relationships are preserved and can be protected during change). ...A paper on metrics might be labeled 2.4 and D (if it is about measuring the readability of specifications) or 1.5 and C (if it is about monitoring software-development activities so that costs and schedules of future projects can be estimated better). ...A paper on social issues in requirements elicitation would be labeled 1.1 and possibly other subcategories of 1 (if it is addressing specific elicitation problems such as setting priorities). It would also be labeled B. INSTRUCTIONS ON USING THIS CLASSIFICATION SCHEME Each paper must have two classifications, one for the problem and one for the contribution. Each classification is a list of low-level categories, in decreasing order of importance. Inevitably, most placement decisions about the paper will be based on the first category in each list. The classification scheme is unusual in some respects, so please apply it thoughtfully. Accurate and consistent classifications will help the program committee understand each paper's proper role, and provide a uniform context for the symposium program. ********************************************************************** From: A.J.C.Blyth@ncl.ac.uk (Andrew Blyth) Subject: Bibliography on Scenarios in Requirements Engineering The following is a list of publications concerning the use of scenarios in the process of requirement engineering. "A Scenario-Based Methodology for Conducting Requirements Elicitation", Holbrook III, Hilliard, ACM SIGSOFT, vol 18, no 1, Jan 1990. "Scenario-Based Prototyping for Requirements Identification", Hooper, James W. and Hsai, Pei, ACM SIGSOFT, vol 7, no 5, 1982 "Scenario Driven Requirements Analysis Method", Wang, Wei and Hufnagel, Steve and Hsia, Pei and Yang, Seung Min, 2nd International conference on systems integration, pp 127-136, 1992 "Using Scenarios in Deficiency-driven Requirements Engineering", John Anderson and Brian Durney, IEEE Intl. Symposium On Requirements Engineering RE93, San Diego, CA, 4-6 January 1993, p 134-41. "Goal Decomposition and Scenario Analysis in Business Process Reengineering", Annie I. Anton, W. Michael McCracken, and Colin Potts, Proceedings of the 6th Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering}, Utrecht, The Netherlands, 6-10 June 1994. "Utilizing Scenarios in the Software Development Process", Benner, Kevin, Martin S. Feather, W. Lewis Johnson & Lorna Zorman., IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on Information Systems Development Process, 9 December 1992. "Getting Around the Task-Artifact Cycle: How to Make Claims and Design By Scenario", J.M. Carroll and M. Rosson, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 10(2), April 1992, pp. 181-212. "On the Use of Scenarios in Requirements Acquisition", Anne Dardenne, University of Oregon, Tech Report, CIS-TR-93-17. "Developing Initial OOA Models", Lubars, M., C. Potts and C. Richter., Proc. 15th Int. Conf. Software Eng., ACM/IEEE Comp. Soc. Press, 1993. "Inquiry-Based Requirements Analysis", Colin Potts, Kenji Takahashi & Annie I. Anton.,IEEE Software, March 1994. "Object Behavior Analysis", Kenneth S. Rubin and Adele Goldberg., Communications of the ACM, 35(9), September 1992, p 48-62. "The Use of Descriptions in Analysis and Design of Information Systems", J. Stage, Collaborative Work, Social Communications and Information Systems, Elsevier Science Publishers B.V., R.K. Stamper, P. Kerola, R. Lee and K. Lyytinen (Editors), pp. 237-260, 1991. "Marcel: A Requirements Elicitation Tool Utilizing Scenarios", S.M. Thebaut, M.F. Interrante, T.F. Burch, R.J. Nroman, R. Van Ghent., Fourth Intl. Workshop on Computer-Aided Software Engineering}, Irvine, CA, 5-8 December 1990, p 279-89. "Specification via Scenarios and Views", W. Lewis Johnson, Proceedings of the 3rd Int. Software Process Workshop, November 1986, pp. 61-63 "Problem acquisition in software analysis: A preliminary study", S. Fickas, S. Collins, and S. Olivier, Technical report CIS-TR-87-04, University of Oregon, 1987. "Automating requirements engineering using artificial intelligence planning techniques", John S. Anderson, Technical report CIS-TR-93-28, University of Oregon, 1993. "A proposed perspective shift: Viewing specification design as a planning problem", John S. Anderson and Stephen Fickas, In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Software Specification and Design (Pittsburgh), IEEE Computer Society Press 1989. ********************************************************************** Subject: CFP Requirements Elicitation for Software-based Systems From: Pearl Brereton Announcement and Call for Papers for a Workshop on: Requirements Elicitation for Software-based Systems (RESS) University of Keele, Staffordshire, UK 12-14 July 1994 Despite advances in the technologies that are usually grouped together under the heading of Software Engineering, the development of large software-based systems is still an area where many difficulties can arise. A particularly significant one, and one that cannot easily be reversed, involves the delivery of systems that fail to meet the customer's needs. Determining the requirements of the customer is an essential input to the later stages of development, since it provides the basis for all the verification and validation tasks involved and meeting these requirements is ultimately essential to the success of the product itself. Unfortunately, this is one area where technological progress has been very limited, in contrast to the progress that has been made with techniques and formalisms that can be used for the subsequent description of requirements. This workshop is aimed at gathering together representatives from three groups: * those who are concerned with the procurement of large (and complex) systems; * researchers in Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence who have developed techniques for requirements elicitation and knowledge elicitation; * system developers who are concerned with making use of the information contained in the system requirements, once they have been established; with the purpose of pooling ideas and experiences in order to address this problem. Format The workshop will consist of a number of presentations, some by invitation, and a number of small-group sessions intended to explore ways of capturing knowledge about systems requirements. Speakers will include Professor Mildred Shaw (Calgary), Professor John McDermid (York) and Professor Ian Sommerville (Lancaster). Numbers will be limited to a maximum of 50 participants. To help with group organisation, all those attending are asked to provide a short position statement summarising their interest in the problems involved. Call for Papers Papers for presentation are invited (maximum size 5000 words, please send three copies) and the closing date for these is Friday 29 April 1994. A selection from these will then be published in the Software Engineering Journal at a later date. Venue Keele University occupies a large campus just outside the market town of Newcastle under Lyme. It is within easy distance of the M6 motorway (junctions 15 or 16), Crewe and Stoke on Trent railway stations, and Manchester Airport. Accommodation will be in study- bedrooms with en-suite facilities. The workshop will begin at 1000 on Tuesday 12 July, and will finish at 1200 on Thursday 14 July. Cost The charge for the workshop is £150, which includes University accommodation for two nights, all meals from lunch on Tuesday to breakfast on Thursday, and a Conference Dinner on Wednesday evening. A booking form is attached. For further details please contact: Dr Pearl Brereton Department of Computer Science, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG Telephone: +44 782 583079 Fax: +44 782 713082 E-mail: RESS@cs.keele.ac.uk Requirements Elicitation for Software-based Systems 12th-14th July 1994 Booking Form First Name(s): ............................................................................ ................. Family Name: ............................................................................ ................... Title: ............................................................................ ......................... Organisation: ............................................................................ .................. Address for correspondence: ............................................................................ ................................ ............................................................................ ................................ ............................................................................ ................................ Tel: ........................ Fax: ............................email: .................................... Special requirements Vegetarian diet: yes/no Other (please specify) ............................................................................ ......... Fees (due at the time of application) Position statement/submitted paper Standard fee £150 Extra Bed and Breakfast(Monday) £40 Attached Thursday lunch £8 To follow Signature:.................................................................. ................... Date:....................................................................... ................... Cheques should be made payable to Keele University. Please return form with payment or purchase order to: Dr. Pearl Brereton, Computer Science Department, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs, ST5 5BG Tel: +44 782 583079 Fax: +44 782 713082 email: RESS@cs.keele.ac.uk **********************************************************************