[ecoop-info] "SE meets Requirements" - Special Issue of REJ - Call for Papers

Fri Feb 16 05:38:45 CET 2007

"Requirements Engineering" Journal - Special Issue

Executive Editors: Pericles Loucopoulos, John Mylopoulos
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1432-010X/

"Software Engineering meets Requirements" - Call for Papers
Guest Editor:
Leszek Maciaszek, Macquarie University ~ Sydney, Australia
http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/~leszek

Motivation

Requirements define the expected services of the system (service
statements) and the constraints that the system must obey (constraint
statements). The service statements constitute the system's functional
requirements. Functional requirements can be grouped into those that
describe the scope of the system, the necessary business functions, and
the required data structures. The constraint statements can be classified
according to different categories of restriction imposed on the system,
such as the required system's correctness, performance, availability, or
security. The constraint statements constitute the system's nonfunctional
requirements. Nonfunctional requirements are also known as software
qualities.

Software engineering deals with the building of complex software systems
that are useful to people, i.e. that satisfy people/users' requirements.
While meeting functional requirements is a necessary condition for success
of any software project, nonfunctional requirements play equally crucial
role for long-term survival of a software solution. From business
perspective, software is an infrastructure service that is fast becoming
commodity (merely enabling business solutions). There are several
implications related to that obvious corrosion of competitive advantage
from software. Perhaps the main implication is to ensure that the system
once delivered can meet the service level that has been defined for it,
while accommodating inevitable changes to functional requirements. The
service level is defined in nonfunctional requirements (qualities). The
quality of overriding and all-encompassing concern is adaptiveness defined
as a set of three interrelated sub-qualities: software understandability,
maintainability and evolvability.

Software engineering strives to meet the demands of this contemporary
business landscape in which requirements are the moving target. Various
novel approaches to software engineering claim to provide answers and
right solutions. Against that background, there is a clear need to
undertake and to provide careful empirical evaluation of the claims made
by new approaches and schools of thought, such as agile software
development, aspect-oriented software development, model driven
engineering, component software, service-oriented architectures,
evolutionary design, intentional software, example centric programming,
language workbenches, agent-oriented software engineering, etc.

The aim of this special issue is to evaluate novel software engineering
approaches to ascertain whether their claim of novelty is legitimate or
perhaps it can be shown to be just a new hype. To this aim, this special
issue coincides with the main motivation behind a series of conferences
called ENASE (Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering;
http://www.enase.org). Like in the case of ENASE, the aim is to reveal any
hype as soon as feasible.

In particular, this special issue is intended to also provide a targeted
publication opportunity for contributors to a special feature of ENASE
conferences called Advocatus Diaboli Forum. The AD Forum is directly
inspired by an ancient, now discarded, mechanism within the Catholic
Church whereby a so-called "Devil's Advocate" (AD) would assemble a
prosecution case against candidates for canonization to sainthood. The AD
was not required to necessarily believe the prosecution case they
prepared, but was required to list every possible reason to reject the
candidate's elevation. Proponents for canonization would then mount a
defense, addressing each of the points raised by the AD. Likewise, in the
ENASE AD Forum sessions, novel approaches to software engineering are
tried in the Forum 'court'.

Scope

Topics of interest include theoretical and/or empirical contributions
related to novel approaches to software engineering and how they meet
functional and especially nonfunctional requirements. Of particular
interest are experience reports or scientific evaluations (qualitative and
quantitative) of existing approaches as well as ideas and proposals for
improvements or for brand new approaches. Contributions to this special
issue (whether derived from or not connected to ENASE conferences) should
take into account that the motivating philosophy requires that claims by
SE approaches to novelty and utility be evaluated by engineering and/or
scientific means.

We solicit experiments, case studies, surveys, meta-analyses, empirical
studies, systematic reviews, conceptual explorations, innovative ideas,
critical appraisals, etc. related to novel approaches to software
engineering and with clear connection to requirements. Below is
(unavoidably incomplete) list of novel approaches that make the headlines
but their "sainthood" status remains untested (at least in the light of
some important user requirements or desired software qualities). For
proper balance, we solicit both contributions against selected approaches
as well as contributions defending them by addressing and refuting the
stated charges directly. We hope to have the 'charge lists' from devil's
advocates available for authors willing to refute the charges.

*          Agile software development practices and methodologies (e.g.
XP)
*          Aspect-oriented software development
*          Model driven engineering
*          Software components and component-based software engineering
*          Web services and service-oriented architectures
*          Business process management and process-centric paradigms
*          Multi-agent systems and agent-oriented software engineering
*          Generative software development
*          Evolutionary design
*          Intentional software
*          Example-centric programming
*          Meta programming systems and language workbenches
*          Competitive systems engineering
*          Knowledge-based systems engineering
*          Architectural design and meta-architectures
*          Design thinking as a paradigm for software development
*          Other novel approaches and lifecycle models

Important Dates

March 26, 2007          Submission of extended abstracts (about 2 pages)
for authors willing to obtain early suitability feedback and guidelines
April 2, 2007             Feedback and guidelines for authors who
submitted abstracts
May 28, 2007            Submission of papers
July 30, 2007              Notification of acceptance/rejection
October 1, 2007         Camera-ready papers due
January 2008              Planned publication of the REJ Special Issue
(Vol. 13, No. 1)

Submissions

Only original papers written in English, which have not been submitted
elsewhere, will be considered for publication.
Extended abstracts should be emailed by 26-03-2007 directly to the guest
editor - leszek at ics.mq.edu.au
Papers should be formatted and submitted by 28-05-2007 according to the
instruction for the contributions to the "Requirements Engineering"
journal accessible at
http://www.editorialmanager.com/rej/

The papers will undergo scrutiny of a thorough peer review process,
however, unlike for regular "Requirements Engineering" papers, the
contributions to this special issue will not be blinded (because of the
amount of necessary communication with the authors to ensure uniformity
and achievements of goals).

Authors should aim at papers of about 20 pages in the final format.

-- 
____________________________________
Leszek A. Maciaszek
http://www.comp.mq.edu.au/~leszek
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