International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Visualization (REV 2006)

Monday, September 11, 2006


Agenda

[PowerPoint]


Package (agenda, papers, presentations, and discussion)

[ZIP]. Password-protected. Email chpkim at gmail.com for password. Official proceedings will be available later through IEEE CS Digital Library.


Program Committee


Themes

With the increasing complexity of software requirements, problems of traditional requirements engineering techniques, including the use of unstructured text and lists, are becoming increasingly apparent; understandability, scalability and analysis are just some of the problematic dimensions for such techniques. Visualization techniques have long been used to overcome these problems in other fields. In the field of education, diagrams are heavily used to aid learning. In various classical engineering disciplines, visualization is used heavily in modeling and simulation. While software engineering has begun to follow in the foot steps of these disciplines with the emergence of model-based development techniques, visualization has largely been at the design level. This workshop aims to explore visualization techniques in the context of requirements elicitation/analysis.

There are many potential use cases of visualization. Visualization may improve understanding of requirements by presenting an overview, by providing navigation facilities for exploration, and by conveying a rich set of information through concise and intuitive syntax. Visualization may also allow the same set of information to be viewed in different perspectives. This could promote collaborative development of requirements, leading to a scalable methodology. Visualization may also facilitate analysis of structured requirements, for example, by providing incremental guidance in formal verification. Visualization, as an intuitive practice, may facilitate requirements elicitation/analysis in many other innovative ways.

However, while innovation is admirable, practicality is almost always a necessity for software engineering techniques to survive. While visualization techniques may be innovative, they have to be practical, like the traditional requirements engineering techniques. The fact that the software industry largely uses traditional requirements elicitation/analysis techniques suggests that practicality is a trait hard to achieve. Thus the workshop will also examine practicality of visualization techniques.


Topics

Topics of interest include experience papers, formal methods, emerging technologies, best practices, research proposals, evaluations and comparisons that focus on visualization techniques for requirements elicitation/analysis. Typical topics of interest include, but are certainly not limited to:

  • Visualization language/technique for requirements elicitation/analysis
  • Visualization support for existing requirements elicitation/analysis techniques
  • Quality assurance of existing requirements elicitation/analysis techniques
  • Process modeling
    • In the context of business/system perspective
    • Simulation
  • Formal verification/validation of requirements
  • Survey of visualization techniques for requirements elicitation/analysis
  • Visualization techniques to facilitate evolution of requirements
  • Heuristics and metrics for visualization techniques


Goals

The workshop aims to provide a collaborative session in which ideas related to visualization of requirements and ways of making them practical are shared, reviewed and debated. The controversy surrounding the practicality of non-traditional requirements engineering techniques will be discussed, as requirements engineering visualization techniques are by no means 'traditional'. The workshop will be used to identify future work, issues, problems and priorities, and to propose recommendations around these dimensions for requirements visualization research.


Targeted Attendees

  • RE researchers working in the development of RE tools, techniques and methods
  • RE researchers and practitioners investigating the deployment of products of RE research in industry
  • RE practitioners with experiences in selection of RE tools, techniques and methods for specific projects


Workshop Paper Format and Evaluation

Position papers (3-5 pages) Short papers, stating the position of the author(s) on any of the topics within the scope of the workshop. For example, position papers could describe experience with a particular research evaluation method, or could propose an area of RE that is ripe for benchmarking, or could propose a benchmark. Position papers will be evaluated based on their potential for generating discussion, and on the originality of the positions expressed.

Full papers (8-10 pages) Full papers either describing experience of comparative evaluation, or report on the results of such evaluation. For example, a full paper might describe how a comparative evaluation of RE techniques was performed in practice, either by controlled experiments in the labs or in industrial settings; or it may present the results of the actual performance of RE tools, methods or processes, in lab-based experiments or in field trials.

Workshop papers will be included in the IEEE CS Digital Library and published on the web.


Workshop Format

The format of REV06 will provide attendees with an opportunity to become familiar with a new topic and establish a good foundation for discussions about visualization in requirements engineering. We intend to make the workshop discussion and interaction oriented. Paper presentations will be used to provoke discussion and participants will break out into small groups for more detailed discussion. These small groups will be organized around common themes or goals identified either from the papers, or by the participants during the workshop. At the end of the day, there will be a plenary session where the groups report back to the workshop as a whole on the results of their discussion and future work. Results may be used as a basis for continued publications.


Duration

  • 1 day (approximately 6 hours)


Important Dates

  • *NEW* June 19, 2006: Deadline for workshop submission
  • July 17, 2006: Notification of authors
  • July 31, 2006: Camera-ready papers due
All deadlines are 23:59 Apia, Samoa time. Please send a PDF submission conforming to IEEE CS proceedings format to chpkim at gmail dot com.


Workshop Co-Chair Backgrounds

Brian Berenbach
Requirements Engineering Program Manager
Siemens Corporate Research
755 College Rd. East
Princeton, NJ 08540-6632
Tel: (609) 734-3395
Fax: (609) 734-6565
Email: brian dot berenbach at siemens dot com

Brian Berenbach is the manager of the requirements engineering competency center at Siemens Corporate Research, Inc., operated for Siemens AG, a global company with earnings in excess of $90 Billion. Mr. Berenbach's responsibilities include training Siemens employees and conducting research and process improvement in all aspects of requirements engineering. In addition to his work for Siemens, he has given courses in requirements analysis for the Army, and has conducted professional development seminars for the IEEE. His research interests include formal methods and visualization techniques in requirements engineering. Mr. Berenbach holds graduate degrees from both Emory University and the USAF Institute of Technology.


Chang Hwan Peter Kim
Ph.D. Candidate
Generative Software Development Lab
Electrical and Computer Engineering Department
University of Waterloo, Canada
Email: chpkim at gmail dot com

Chang Hwan Peter Kim is a Ph.D. candidate in Generative Software Development Lab, supervised by Professor Krzysztof Czarnecki. His publications include extensive work on using feature models in the context of model-driven software product lines. His research interests include many topics in software engineering, some of which are model-driven software product lines, aspect-oriented software development, programming languages, and requirements engineering.