Date: Thu, 17 Jun 93 14:56:40 BST To: re-world@doc.ic.ac.uk From: acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk (Anthony Finkelstein) X-Sender: acwf@gummo.doc.ic.ac.uk Subject: REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER (6) ****************REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER******************** No. 6. Contents 1. Causality (Philip Morris) 2. RE93 Proceedings (Steve Fickas) 3. ICSE-16 CFP (Axel van Lamsweerde) 4. Report on RE93 (Stephan Jacobs, Matthias Jarke, Klaus Pohl) 5. IFIP 8.1 WC on Information Systems Development CFP (Barbara Pernici) Contributions to: re-list@doc.ic.ac.uk (will be moderated) Subscription or Removal 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 ********************************************************************** From: philipm@minster.york.ac.uk Subject: Causality References We would be grateful for any references on the use of causality in requirements analysis. References should be sent to philipm@minster.york.ac.uk. Should anyone else be interested I will be happy to foward the responses if they notify me. Philip Morris ********************************************************************** From: fickas@maxwell.cs.uoregon.edu Subject: RE93 Proceedings People have been contacting me to get copies of the RE93 Proceedings. It appears IEEE has run out of their printing of the proceedings and does not plan a second printing. I am keeping a list of people who would like a copy. I plan to present it to IEEE if I get enough names to convince them to do a second run. If you are interested in obtainting the proceedings, send me your name and I'll add you to my list. Steve Fickas ********************************************************************** CALL FOR PAPERS 16th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING Sorrento, ITALY, May 16-21, 1994 SPONSORED BY: IEEE Computer Society, ACM Sigsoft and AICA The objective of ICSE is to foster the development of the software engineering field by: 1) providing a forum for the introduction and discussion of new software engineering research results; 2) providing the practicing engineer an evaluation of evolving research; 3) providing the research community exposure to the problems of practical applications of software engineering; and 4) encouraging the exchange of advanced software technology and experience within the international community. To address these goals ICSE-16 will integrate a variety of events: presentations of technical papers, panels, tutorials, research workshops and tools demonstrations. REFEREED PAPERS should include a short abstract, a list of descriptive keywords, specification of the type of submission (Research/Experience) and complete contact information for the lead author. Submissions must be no longer than 6000 words. Their content must not have been previously pub- lished, nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. RESEARCH PAPERS will be evaluated for originality, significance, soundness, and clarity. Theoretical and methodological papers should clearly show how the results presented contribute to software engineering practice. Papers on systems should concentrate on technical and architectural issues rather than providing feature-by-feature descriptions. Experimental papers should describe the experimental method used and interpret the results in terms of practice. EXPERIENCE REPORTS will be evaluated for significance of the lessons and insights gained from use of advanced methods and techniques. All papers should clearly indicate what is new and significant about the work presented and how it compares with related work. Accepted papers will appear in the conference proceedings. The best papers will be considered for publication in a special issue of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (ACM TOSEM). PANEL PROPOSALS should include the title, a brief description of the objectives and issues to be covered, the panel chair and probable panelists (including short vitae). Panels will be selected according to their substance and contributions to the conference program. Submissions of eight (8) copies of Papers, Panel Proposals, and Tutorial Proposals should be sent by September 6, 1993 to program co-chair, Axel van Lamsweerde. TUTORIAL PROPOSALS should address important software engineering topics that are of particular interest to practitioners. Proposals should include a detailed topical outline of the material to be covered, should specify the proposed length of the tutorial (full or half day), and the background and experience of the instructor. Proposal selection will be based upon appropriateness of the topic, quality of the outline, credentials of the instructor, and likely appeal of the topic to prospective conference attendees. Tutorial proposals should be sent by September 6, 1993 to tutorial co-chair Aniello Cimitile. TOOLS FAIR PROPOSALS should suggest the demonstration of tools, systems and environments that represent the best of current research work or commercially available products. Proposals should include a brief description of the software to be demonstrated, the demonstration itself, and any technical presentations desired. The character of these demon- strations and presentations must be consistent with the scholarly nature of ICSE. Tools Fair proposal selection will be based upon the importance, relevance, and novelty of the software to be demonstrated. Proposals should be submitted by January 31, 1994 to Tools Fair co-chair Alfonso Fuggetta. WORKSHOPS. Three pre-Conference workshops will explore research issues at the intersection between Software Engineering and other disciplines. The subject areas and contact points for these workshops are: Software Engineering and Databases (Roger King: roger@cs.colorado.edu), Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (Steve Fickas: fickas@cs.uoregon.edu), Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction (Dick Taylor: taylor@ics.uci.edu). Each workshop will develop a research agenda, which will be presented at a special session of the conference. There will also be a post-Conference workshop on Software Engineering Education (Anthony Finkelstein: acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk). Please contact the workshop chairs for information on how to participate. GENERAL CHAIR Bruno Fadini Dept. Informatica e Sistemistica University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio 21 I - 80125 Napoli (Italy) Email: fadini@vm.cised.unina.it Tel: +39-81-768-3193 Fax: +39-81-768-3186 PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS Leon J. Osterweil Dept. of Information and Computer Science University of California at Irvine Irvine, CA 92717-3425 (USA) Email: ljo@ics.uci.edu Tel: +1-714-856-4048 Fax: +1-714-856-4056 Axel van Lamsweerde Unite d'Informatique Universite Catholique de Louvain Place Sainte Barbe 2 B - 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium) Email: avl@info.ucl.ac.be Tel: +32-10-47-2529 Fax: +32-10-45-0345 TUTORIAL CO-CHAIRS Aniello Cimitile Dept. Informatica e Sistemistica University of Naples Federico II Via Claudio 21 I - 80125 Napoli (Italy) Email: cimitile@vm.cised.unina.it Tel: +39-81-768-3199 Fax: +39-81-768-3186 Eugene C. Bounds Software Engineering Institute Carnegie-Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 (USA) Email: ecb@sei.cmu.edu Tel: +1-412-268-6387 Fax: +1-412-268-5758 TOOLS FAIR CO-CHAIRS Alfonso Fuggetta Politecnico di Milano Dip. di Elettronica ed Informazione Piazza Leonardo da Vinci, 32 I - 20133 Milano (Italy) Email: alfonso@mailer.cefriel.it Tel: +39-2-2399-3523 Fax: +39-2-2399-3411 Walt Scacchi Information & Operations Management University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-1421 (USA) Email: scacchi@usc.edu Tel: +1-213-740-4782 Fax: +1-213-740-8494 PROGRAM COMMITTEE R. Adrion (USA) R. Jacquart (France) D. Perry (USA) L. Clarke (USA) R. Jeffery (Australia) W. Schaefer (Germany) M. Feather (USA) T. Katayama (Japan) R. Taylor (USA) S. Fickas (USA) R. Kemmerer (USA) I. Thomas (USA) J.P. Finance (France) B. Lang (France) K. Torii (Japan) A. Finkelstein (UK) N. Leveson (USA) E. Weyuker (USA) A. Fuggetta (Italy) T. Maibaum (UK) J. Wing (USA) K. Futatsugi (Japan) C. Montangero (Italy) J.C. Woodcock (UK) D. Garlan (USA) D. Notkin (USA) P. Zave (USA) C. Ghezzi (Italy) ********************************************************************* Report on the First International IEEE Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE93) San Diego, Jan. 4-6, 1993 Stephan Jacobs, Matthias Jarke, Klaus Pohl Informatik V, RWTH Aachen Ahornstr. 55, 5100 Aachen, Germany Introduction The IEEE Computer Society held its first international symposium on requirements engineering with about two hundred participants in the beautiful Hotel Coronado close to San Diego, California. The audience was spread across many different countries, with the majority of papers coming from the US and the UK. The program committee, led by Anthony Finkelstein (Imperial College London) and Steve Fickas (University of Oregon, USA), had decided on a very selective high-quality paper strategy with at most two parallel sessions, a very good approach to achieve coherence in this wide open field. The following report first gives a brief overview of the structure of the conference and then summarizes some impressions we got about the most important results presented. Finally, we point to sources for further information. Session overview The conference began with a keynote talk by Sue Voigt (NASA) who reported the problems encountered in managing requirements for a very large and long-term project, the development of space station Freedom. One of the central points that came out of this talk was the importance of maintaining an ongoing vision despite the pressure from many different interest groups which is bound to happen in such projects, also to maintain traceability of changing requirements in a large distributed work context. Measures taken tend to be organizational rather than just technical in nature. A second part of the initial plenary session was devoted to an assessment of the past, present, and future of requirements engineering. Mitch Lubars reported on the commercial state-of-the-art in RE, focusing on the difference between market-driven and customer-driven projects. This was contrasted with research reports on work in the KBSA initiative at Rome Laboratories in the US, and in the ESPRIT Basic Research Project on Requirements Engineering, NATURE. The parallel sessions consisted of paper sessions and panels on critical issues in requirements engineering. Paper sessions addressed issues such as: * expressing and managing nonfunctional and organizational requirements * the interplay of domain knowledge representation and handling of different viewpoints * tools and environments for editing, storing, and transforming requirements information * retrieval strategies for requirements reuse, in part based on domain models * social perspectives, emphasizing the so-called ethnographic approach of the Oxford group * management of formal specifications and their evolution * natural language interfaces to requirements engineering systems * methods and models of requirements processes based on conceptual modeling technology * challenges concerning the management of change, requirements knowledge, and policy. Three lively and informative panels gave some surprising impressions which will be discussed in the next section. Topics addressed included: * the scope of requirements engineering: composite systems with embedded software rather than just the software part * the question whether object-orientation is really a solution to (all? some?) requirements engineering problems * the handling of requirements assumptions and rationale as part of a requirements process information system. A biased summary of results Despite a generally high quality of papers and presentations, we gained the feeling that the conference suffered from a central, perhaps unavoidable problem: nobody seemed to know what requirements engineering is. This was most evident in the debate of software vs. system engineering, but also in presentations that could have addressed any other occurence of problem or technology X (X =3D group collaboration, for example) as well as requirements engineering. To speak in the words of McMenamin and Palmer: it was unclear what is the essence of requirements engineering vs. its many incarnations resulting from the context in which it happens. Our feeling, gained from listening to all conference sessions (as a distributed team), is that a solution to this problem will have to involve both the aspect of a system vision as the initial reason for RE, and the aspect of realizing this vision in an existing context through a process that is social as well as cognitive and technical. Below this very general and perhaps not all that important definitional issue, some specific observations seemed to emerge from the sea of talks: * The panel discussions as well as several talks showed that the fashionable assumption that object orientation solves everything, thus also RE, is not justified: requirements are not object-oriented, but assertions about present or desirable observations. Panelists reported that users do not find it natural to express their requirements in object-oriented fashion and that, in constrast to traditional methods, object-oriented analysis only works with very considerable computer support which is not yet really available. A possible explanation may be that object orientation is inherently a design-level organizational concept, both for the explanation of existing reality and for proposing a new reality. * The instance level is important. People abstract from reality in different ways, and they change their way of abstracting over time. Recording just these abstractions does not do justice to this complexity and leads to incomprehensible and often wrong specifications. Instance level information must be recorded to explain model acquisition but also forms the basis for replay of explanatory usage scenarios and for tutoring newcomers to projects. The ethnographic approach, pursued by many British research groups around Joe Goguen=ABs lab in Oxford is an extreme approach in this direction. On the technical side, the instance-to-model relationship often goes along with a formal-to-formal transition in representation but this need not be the case. * A second socially caused problem that seems to be underestimated by modelers, is the fact that requirements modeling is always for a purpose. The visions of different stakeholders may clash so that requirements are not "elicited" from somebody=ABs pre-existing knowledge but are cooperatively constructed artefacts. This construction must be recorded and it must be continuously revisable, a strong requirement on RE process models as well as one the formal support for future requirements models and management systems. * A third point along these lines concerns requirements reuse. Due to individual differences in abstraction and modeling, people may have different abstractions of a domain, a difficult problem to be handled by proponents of domain modeling. Moreover, domain-model based reuse may create the problem of "dead wood", i.e., forced reuse of irrelevant features together useful ones. Argumentation reuse may then be more effective than result reuse out of context. * A final important point is that domain analysis and system specification are not the same. Several speakers observed that there is no structure-preserving mapping between the application-level requirements specification and the system architecture. A one-to-one mapping of language constructs from requirements to designs is therefore bound to fail for large systems. An interesting step towards solving this problem is the definition of meta viewpoints that at least help propagate change across the different worlds related to an RE project. Together with nonfunctional requirements, organization of requirements models as viewpoint hierarchies also seems to address some of the "freedoms" (temporary inconsistency, incompleteness, and informality) that have been recently demanded for requirements modeling languages. The future The symposium has set in motion a much needed debate about making requirements engineering a more solid and useful field of research. The growing interest in this field is emphasized by the fact that IEEE is sponsoring a second, more practitioner-oriented international conference on RE, the first incarnation of which is to be held simultaneously in Boulder and Taipei, April 18-22, 1994. The second IEEE Symposium will take place at the University of York, UK, in early 1995. The proceedings of RE 93 are available from the IEEE Computer Society Press under order number 3120. ****************************************************************************** IFIP WG 8.1 WORKING CONFERENCE ON INFORMATION SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT PROCESS (ISDP) Centro A. Volta, Villa Olmo, Como, Italy 1-3 September 1993 First Call for Participation Aims and scope of the conference The problem of the design of information systems has two different aspects. The first one concerns the specification of the system so that construction designers and, subsequently, implementors can transform this specification into an operational, computer-based, system. The second aspect deals with the process in terms of the various stages that have to be gone through in order to arrive at a specification. The conference on Information System Development Process aims at bringing together experts in the area with the aim of improving the common understanding of the information system development process. Thus, the central theme of the conference is the information system development process: how and in what concepts can it be modeled, how a model of the development process can be evaluated, and how computer based support can be provided to facilitate the development process. ADVANCE PROGRAM Tuesday, August 31, 1993 18.00 - 18.30 Registration 19.00 - 20.00 Welcome cocktail Wednesday, September 1, 1993 8.00 - 9.00 Registration 9.00 - 10.30 Conference opening Keynote speaker: M. Jarke, Univ. of Aachen, Germany - Vision Driven Requirement Engineering 11.00 - 12.30 Process/product modeling R. Conradi, Norwegian Institute of Technology, Norway, Customization and Evolution of Process Models in EPOS M. Moreno, C. Souveyet, Univ. of Paris I, France, The Evolutionary Object Model (EOM) 14.00 - 15.30 Reuse I X. Castellani, Lab. CEDRIC IIE (CNAM), France, Mechanisms of Standardized Reusability of Objects R. Bellinzona, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, M.G. Fugini, Univ. of Pavia, Italy, V. de Mey, Univ. of Geneva, Switzerland, Reuse of Specifications and Designs in a Development Information System 16.30 - 18.15 Requirements engineering A. Sutcliffe, N. Maiden, City Univ., UK, Use of Domain Knowledge for Requirements Validation K. Benner, M.S. Feather, W. L. Johnson, L. Zorman, Univ. of Southern California, USA, Utilizing Scenarios in the Software Development Process J. Gyrks, Univ. of Maribor, Slovenia, Assessment and Control of Requirements Elicitation Process in a CASE Environment Thursday, September 2, 1993 9.00 - 10.30 Metamodeling M. Saeki, K. Iguchi, K. Wen-yin, M. Shinohara, Tokyo Univ. of Technology, Japan, A Meta-Model for Representing Software Specification & Design Methods K. van Slooten, S. Brinkkemper, Univ. of Twente, The Netherlands, A Method Engineering Approach to Information Systems Development 11.00 - 12.30 Cooperative approaches A.J.C. Blyth, J. Chudge, Univ. of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, The Role of Interaction Analysis in Requirements Engineering R. Andersen, A. Solvberg, Univ. of Trondheim, Norway, Conflict Management in Systems Development Groups 14.30 - 16.00 Process/product modeling II J.R. Schmitt, Univ. of Paris 1, France, Product Modelling for Requirements Engineering Process Modelling R. Darimont, J. Souquires, Univ. de Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium, A Development Model: Application to Z Specifications 16.30 - 18.00 Panel: Process Modeling from different Perspectives (chairperson N. Prakash) Friday, September 3, 1993 9.00 - 10.30 Reuse II S. Castano, V. De Antonellis, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Reusing Process Specifications P. Constantopoulos, M. Doerr, Y. Vassiliou, FORTH, Greece, Repositories for Software Reuse: The Software Information Base 11.00 - 12.30 Information system engineering A. T. Berztiss, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA, Concurrent Engineering of Information Systems H. Gerrits, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Business Process Redesign and Information Systems Design: A happy Couple? 12.30 - 13.00 Closing session Friday, September 3 afternoon and September 4 IFIP WG 8.1. Business meetings General Conference Chairperson Colette Rolland UFR 06 Universite' de Paris 1 17 rue de la Sorbonne 75231 Paris CEDEX 05, France e-mail: rolland@masi.ibp.fr Programme Committee Chairperson Naveen Prakash Department of Computer Engineering Delhi Institute of Technology Old IG Block, Kashmere gate Delhi, India e-mail: np@dit.ernet.in Organizing Committee Chairperson Barbara Pernici Universita' di Udine via Zanon 6 33100 Udine UD, Italy e-mail: pernici@ipmel2.polimi.it phone: +39-432-272206, fax +39-432-510755 Programme Committee F. Van Assche, Belgium T. Katayama, Japan F. Bodart, Belgium M. Leonard, Switzerland B. Boehm, USA I.G. Macdonald, UK S. Brinkkemper, The Netherlands B. Moulin, Canada J.A. Bubenko, Sweden J. Mylopoulos, Canada M. Chen, USA A. Olive, Spain P. Creasy, Australia B. Pernici, Italy A. Finkelstein, UK C. Potts, USA A. Flory, France N. Prakash, India M. Franckson, France C. Rolland, France C. Ghezzi, Italy W. Schaefer, Germany B. Hendersen-Sellers, Australia A. Solvberg, Norway J. Iivari, Finland A. Sutcliffe, UK M. Jarke, Germany T. Tomiyama, Japan L.W. Johnson, USA R.J. Welke, USA ------------------------------------------------------------ REGISTRATION INFORMATION Registration fees early registration (before June 30, 1993) It. L. 600000 late registration (after June 30, 1993) It. L. 800000 student registration It. L. 200000 Conference location The conference will be held at in Villa Olmo, Como, in front of Como Lake, about 45 Km. north of Milan. For further information about registration and accomodation please request the complete information package to: Prof. B. Pernici at pernici@ipmel2.polimi.it or ISDP '93 secretariat Centro Scientifico A. Volta Villa Olmo Como, Italy tel. +39-31-572213 fax +39-31-573395 **************************************************************************