C A L L   F O R   P A P E R S :
R E F S Q ' 9 7

Third International Workshop on Requirements Engineering:
Foundation for Software Quality

June 16-17 1997
Barcelona, Catalonia
(preceding the CAiSE*97 conference)

The 1997 programme is here, the presentation kit for 1997 is here, and the workshop summary for 1997 is here.

P U R P O S E

The ultimate measurement for software quality is the degree to which user requirements are fulfilled by a system. Early elicitation and correct definition of requirements prevents costly rework during later development stages and provides the foundation for building high quality systems. Therefore, requirements engineering is considered as a more and more crucial part of the system life cycle.

During requirements engineering the user and engineers have to find a way from an initially opaque and diverse system understanding to exact, reconciled and at least partially formalized system specifications. A multitude of methods from software engineering, ethnology, social sciences, and psychology have been adapted to support this process and to achieve a growing quality of the requirements specification as a foundation of higher system quality. Most of these methods are relying on adequate specification languages which are expressive and formal enough so that the represented quality requirements can be verified or validated.

At the REFSQ'94 and REFSQ'95 workshops researchers and practitioners from various disciplines presented approaches that focused on the improvement of the definition and implementation of (quality) requirements. The success of REFSQ'94 and REFSQ'95 encouraged us to provide a follow-up workshop REFSQ'97 as a stage for the discussion of quality-related problems in requirements engineering as they have developed over the last year. In particular, we like to encourage people from the software and information systems engineering field to present their approaches to higher software quality and to discuss how requirements engineering can contribute to it.

G O A L

The main goal of the REFSQ'97 is to bring together people working in the fields of requirements engineering and software (information systems) engineering focussing on the

• specification of quality requirements;
• their traceability back to user needs and forward to the design;
• their realization by SE methods;
• the measurement of their achievement, as well as
• consolidating the achievements of the two previous REFSQ workshops.

T H E M E S

REFSQ'97 invites contributions from research and industry within the following four main themes:

1. Embedding RE in the organisational context.
   Relevant topics include: change management, procurement, organisational learning, business processes, etc.

2. Managing the quality of RE processes.
   Relevant topics include: traceability, process modelling and monitoring, RE project organisation, quality models of RE and the RE process, environments for supporting RE processes, CAME environments, etc.

3. Quality assurance and RE.
   Relevant topics include: models for quality assurance, considering quality assurance in RE, software quality and RE, specification of software quality requirements, measuring the quality of requirements, etc.

4. Mapping requirements specifications to software architecture and design.
   Relevant topics include: transformation and mapping methods, the interplay between requirements and software quality features, formal representation methods, etc.

Note that the list topics mentioned for each theme is not intended to be exhaustive. High-quality papers on other topics within each of the four themes are welcomed.

Papers should emphasize what is new and significant about the chosen approach and adequately compare it with similar work. Integration of the contributions with mainstream RE methods and products (like SA, OMT, ER, and the like) are especially encouraged.

P A R T I C I P A T I O N

The workshop will be an interactive forum. Each presentation will be summarized by two discussants and followed by a panel discussion between the authors and the audience. Attendance will be limited to around 25 people and all participants must contribute accepted full or position papers. The workshop language is English.

The workshop is being organized in conjunction with the CAiSE*97 conference, and all workshop participants are expected to attend the main conference.

I N S T R U C T I O N S   F O R   A U T H O R S

Send your full paper (max. 6000 words) or position paper (max. 2000 words) by e-mail or via normal post before March 17th (arrival date) to:

REFSQ'97
Department of Information Science
University of Bergen
N-5020 Bergen
Norway

Email: Andreas.Opdahl@ifi.uib.no

Papers will be published in the REFSQ'97 workshop proceedings, and preprints of the papers will be made available for accepted and registered participants at the beginning of the workshop.

I M P O R T A N T   D A T E S

O R G A N I Z A T I O N

Email:	edu@info.fundp.ac.be
	Andreas.Opdahl@ifi.uib.no
	pohl@informatik.rwth-aachen.de