Multimedia Requirements Engineering Beyond MeRE Descriptions

Name of Workshop

Second International Workshop on

Multimedia Requirements Engineering (MeRE'07.de) — Beyond Mere Descriptions

Tuesday AM, 27th of March 2007

Hamburg, Germany

Call for Papers (plain text)

Contributions

The workshop agenda is available. Click on the paper titles to view the respective abstracts.

Agenda

Previous Workshop

The homepage of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Requirements Engineering (MeRE'06), co-located with the 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'06), has been moved:

http://wwwbruegge.in.tum.de/MeRE/RE06/

Abstract

Good requirements are an important precondition of successful software development. Novel ways to produce high-quality requirements that add value to the entire software development lifecycle are needed.

Most requirements development and management efforts focus on the production of textual descriptions. This approach has several disadvantages. First, text constitutes a language barrier, particularly a challenge for global companies. Second, text is an abstract form of communication and its interpretation is always based on experience, preconceptions, and digestibility. Third, without proper tool support, requirements quickly become outdated, inconsistent, or overwhelmingly long.

This workshop builds on ideas of the First International Workshop on Multimedia Requirements Engineering (MeRE'06): Instead of considering writing as the foremost subject of requirements engineering, we stress understanding and evolution. Multimedia, which includes the universal meta-medium of text, may bring requirements "to life." The general theme of the workshop is communication and modeling of requirements in media other than text.

Topics

Topics of interest include experiences, formal methods, emerging technologies, best practices, research proposals, evaluations and comparisons that focus on multimedia use in requirements development/analysis. Typical topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Media languages/techniques for requirements development/analysis
• Semiological modeling
• Metadata annotation and harvesting technologies
• Case studies of multimedia requirements development/analysis
• Multimedia techniques and tools to facilitate evolution of representations
• Use of portable devices for realtime media capture and annotation

Goals

The workshop aims to provide a collaborative session in which ideas related to multimedia use for requirements engineering are shared, reviewed and debated. The controversy surrounding the practicality of emerging requirements engineering techniques will also be discussed. The workshop will be used to identify future work, issues, problems and priorities, and to propose recommendations around these dimensions for multimedia requirements 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
• Multimedia experts who wish to explore scientific and professional use of multimedia technology
• Backgrounds in pedagogy, semiology, or communication design a plus!

Workshop Format

MeRE'07.de will provide attendees with an opportunity to become familiar with a new topic and establish a good foundation for discussions about multimedia 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.

Paper 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, positions 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.

Program Committee

Olly Gotel, Pace University, USA

Paul Grünbacher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Jane Cleland-Huang, DePaul University, USA

Heinrich Hußmann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Seok-Won Lee, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Asarnusch Rashid, FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe, Germany

Organizers

Oliver Creighton

Siemens AG

Corporate Technology (CT)

Software & Engineering 1 (SE 1) - Development Techniques

Otto-Hahn-Ring 6

D-81730 München, Germany

Oliver Creighton is an Engineer at Siemens AG. Mr. Creighton's responsibilities include consulting, training, and further developing requirements engineering techniques for several operating units within Siemens. He received his diploma in computer science from Technische Universität München in 2001 and his doctoral degree with distinction on a video-based requirements engineering technique in 2006. He is co-author of the book "Open-Source-Software" published in 2004 by Springer-Verlag. His research interests include requirements & development techniques, knowledge modeling, and cinematic communication.

Bernd Bruegge

Applied Software Engineering - Institut für Informatik / I1

Technische Universität München

Boltzmannstraße 3

D-85748 Garching, Germany

Bernd Bruegge is university professor of computer science with a chair for Applied Software Engineering at the Technische Universität München and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Diploma from the University of Hamburg in 1978, and his masters of science in 1982 and his Ph.D in computer science in 1985 from Carnegie Mellon University. He has taught object-oriented software engineering project courses for 15 years. In 1995, he won the Herbert A. Simon Excellence in Teaching Award at the CMU. Prof. Bruegge has also been serving as an international consultant. He is the co-author of the book "Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Using UML, Patterns and Java" published by Prentice Hall. His research interests include software architectures for dynamic systems, agile software development processes, and software engineering education. His educational focus is in how to teach students software development competence by involving them in the development of large complex systems for real clients.