Introduction to the RE’10 special issue Requirements Engineering in a multi-faceted World

Abstract

The 18th International Requirements Engineering Conference, held in Sydney, Australia, from September 27, 2010 to October 1, 2010, addressed the challenges of ‘‘Requirements Engineering in a multi-faceted World.’’ This theme highlighted the rich and diverse contexts of software and systems engineering projects, where requirements engineering methodologies, tools, and processes, are influenced by factors such as the size, domain, location, criticality, people, and organizational culture of a project. The origins of the requirements engineering conference series stems back to the IEEE Symposium on Requirements Engineering held in San Diego, California, in 1993. For 8 years, the symposium alternated with the Conference on Requirements Engineering, until the two series were merged to form a single conference in 2002. The current merged conference provides an annual forum for researchers and practitioners to engage in a lively discussion and debate of current issues and challenges related to both the theory and practice of requirements engineering. The 18th International Conference on Requirements Engineering hosted three excellent keynote speakers. Dr. Al Davis, Professor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, challenged participants to keep their eyes focused on the end goal of their research and to deliver solutions that ultimately impact and improve the state of practice. Dr. Mary O’Kane, Chief Scientist and Scientific Engineer in the State of New South Wales, Australia, and also Executive Chairman of a Sydney-based company that advises governments, universities, and the private sector on innovation, research, education, and development, contextualized requirements engineering issues from the perspective of Australia’s recent growth in both government and industrial sectors. Finally, Dr. Graeme Simsion, who served as CEO of a business and information systems consultancy company and now works as an independent consultant, shared his perspectives on consulting and ethics in the requirements engineering domain. The 18th International Requirements Engineering Conference included both an industry and a research track which fostered lively and insightful conversations between academics and practitioners. The research track received 153 viable submissions. A multi-tiered review process was followed in which each paper was evaluated by three program committee members, and papers with at least one positive review were discussed further by program committee and board members. Ultimately 24 full-length papers were accepted, and three short papers, producing an acceptance rate of just under 16%. Program Committee members were then asked to recommend papers for consideration for this special edition of the Requirements Engineering Journal. Eight papers were recommended and ultimately five of them were selected for submission. All of these papers have undergone a standard journal review process with subsequent revisions, and we are pleased to present them in this special issue of REJ. The first paper accepted to this special issue of REJ, entitled ‘‘Analysing anaphoric ambiguity in natural language requirements’’ by Yang, de Roeck, Gervasi, Willis, and Nuseibeh, investigates the problem of nocuous ambiguities. These occur when requirements are written in natural language, and humans disagree on their interpretation. This paper, which won the best paper award at the conference, describes an automated approach for identifying such ambiguities in a requirements specification. Highlighting potential problem areas allows humans to discuss and disambiguate the impacted requirements. J. Cleland-Huang (&) School of Computing, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: jhuang@cs.depaul.edu