[ecoop-info] CFP - Agile Requirements Engineering (Agile RE): an ECOOP 2011 workshop

[Joao Araujo]

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Call for Papers
Agile Requirements Engineering (Agile RE)
an ECOOP 2011 Workshop

26th July 2011, Lancaster, UK

http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~gacitur1/AREW11/index.htm

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Ever since agile first emerged in the 1990s, there has been debate about
what role, if any, requirements engineering (RE) can play for agile
practitioners and their customers. That agile development needs
requirements is not disputed, but the relevance of the assumptions,
methodologies, techniques and tools that make up the discipline that has
become known as RE, is. Thus, while agile emphasizes incremental discovery
and satisfaction cycles with face-to-face interaction rather than
documentation, RE has traditionally stressed full understanding of
requirements before commitment to coding and rigorously maintained,
version-managed and traced requirements documents. Yet both of these views
are stereotypes, rendered even less valid by the evolution that has
occurred in both the agile and RE worlds. Thus, for example, techniques
have emerged from the RE community for dealing with volatile domains where
the requirements can’t be fully known before coding begins; sometimes not
even before deployment. Similarly techniques have been developed in the
agile community for modelling, structuring, and analyzing requirements
knowledge.

The aim of the Agile RE workshop is to take stock of the two worldviews to
discover whether agile needs RE, and whether novel RE practices can
deliver what agile needs.

WORKSHOP FORMAT

We aim to make Agile RE a genuine working event, in which all attendees
actively participate during what we hope will be a really stimulating day.
 We encourage participation from both the agile and the RE communities as
well as from non-aligned but interested people, from seasoned
practitioners and PhD students, from people with concrete experience to
report and people primarily interested in learning.

The event will begin with a keynote by Wolfgang Emmerich, Professor of
Distributed Computing at University College London and Chairman of Zuhlke
Engineering Ltd.

We will use the paper presentations to draw out themes for discussion;
these might be issues needing more research, factors inhibiting industry
take-up or just points of mutual benefit to the RE and agile communities.
The rest of the day will be spent in interactive, plenary and group
discussions of these themes, with the aim of identifying an agenda for
further research, technology transfer or for better communication and
dissemination.

PAPERS

We invite submissions of papers describing experiences, challenges,
vision, and ideas on the need for, or use of requirements engineering
techniques in agile software development projects. Topics of interest
include but are not limited to:

- New requirements techniques, methods or tools aimed at supporting agile
development
- New agile development techniques, methods or tools incorporating novel
requirements handling
- Evaluations of requirements techniques, methods or tools with
implications for the support of agile development
- Evaluations of agile development with implications for requirements
handling
- Experience reports of requirements handling in agile development
- Position statements on the relationship between RE and agile development

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM digital library. Accordingly,
we will ensure a rigorous review process that guarantees the quality of
the accepted papers. To be accepted for the ACM digital library, authors
will be required to revise their papers to address reviewers’ comments and
the outcome of discussions following the workshop.

We will use the workshop website as the nucleus of a community of
interest, serving as a resource for workshop attendees and other
interested parties, with links to related sites of interest such as the
BCS RESG. A workshop report will be published on the website.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submission of papers: 1st April 2011
Author notification: 10th May 2011
Workshop: 26th July 2011

Submission of revised papers for ACM digital library: to be confirmed

PAPER SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS

Submissions will be handled by EasyChair. Papers must be written in
English, and be no longer than 6 pages, including references, appendices
and figures, and written using the LNCS style. For more information about
formatting please consult the Springer LNCS web site at Springer LNCS.

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE

Pete Sawyer, Lancaster University (UK)
Emmanuel Letier, University College of London (UK)
Joao Araujo, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal)
Ricardo Gacitua, Lancaster University (UK)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Helen Sharp, Open University (UK)
Bashar Nuseibeh, Lero (Ireland) & The Open University (UK)
Julian Holmes, Unified Process Mentor (UK)
Simon Monk, Momote ltd. (UK)
Jutta Eckstein, IT communication (Germany)
Tom Gilb, Result Planning (No)
Ken Boness, University of Reading (UK)
Rachel Harisson, Oxford Brookes University (UK)