MIP and best paper awards Research/Industry Track 8 Research/Industry Track 9
Closing session (plenary)
17:30-18:00
Interactive Design Thinking Session (RO)
18:00-18:30
Welcome Reception
Steering Committee Meeting
19:30
Organization Dinner
Banquet (buses leave at 18:30)
Detailed Program
Monday, September 04
8:00
Registration [Lobby area, Building Reitoria]
9:00 - 10:30
Workshops
MoDRE - 7th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RE4SuSy - 6th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
ESPRE - 4th Workshop on Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering [Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
UsARE - 3rd International Workshop on Usability and Accessibility focused Requirements Engineering [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
CrowdRE - 2nd International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering [Room: 7, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Tutorials
T01 - User Story Best Practices: Requirements in Agile Context (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
T07 - Writing requirements documents with goals: the KAOS/Objectiver approach (Full-day)[Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
T08 - Agile Business Rule Development (Full-day)[CANCELLED]
T10 - Writing Good Requirements (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Doctoral Symposium
Room: 11, Building Polidesportivo
Opening by Mats Heimdahl, Jörg Dörr (9:00-9:10)
Towards a Bayesian Decision Model for Agile Release Planning by Olawole Oni (9:10-9:50)
An Approach to Support the Specification of Agile Artifacts in the Development of Safety-Critical Systems by Ana Isabella Muniz Leite (9:50-10:30)
Coffee Break (10:30-11:00)
11:00 - 12:30
MoDRE - 7th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RE4SuSy - 6th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
ESPRE - 4th Workshop on Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering [Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
UsARE - 3rd International Workshop on Usability and Accessibility focused Requirements Engineering [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
CrowdRE - 2nd International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering [Room: 7, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T01 - User Story Best Practices: Requirements in Agile Context (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
T07 - Writing requirements documents with goals: the KAOS/Objectiver approach (Full-day)[Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
T08 - Agile Business Rule Development (Full-day)[CANCELLED]
T10 - Writing Good Requirements (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Reusable Goal Models by Mustafa Berk Duran (11:00-11:40)
Towards an adaptive framework for goal-oriented strategic decision-making by Jacek Dąbrowski (11:40-12:20)
Dealing with Conflicts between Non-Functional Requirements of Ubicomp and IoT Applications by Rainara Carvalho (12:20-13:00)
Lunch (12:30-14:00)
14:00 - 15:30
MoDRE - 7th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RE4SuSy - 6th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
ESPRE - 4th Workshop on Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering [Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
UsARE - 3rd International Workshop on Usability and Accessibility focused Requirements Engineering [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
CrowdRE - 2nd International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering [Room: 7, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T01 - User Story Best Practices: Requirements in Agile Context (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
T07 - Writing requirements documents with goals: the KAOS/Objectiver approach (Full-day)[Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
T08 - Agile Business Rule Development (Full-day)[CANCELLED]
T10 - Writing Good Requirements (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Awareness Driven Software Reengineering by Ana M. M. Moura (14:00-14:40)
Verifying Cyber-Physical System Behavior in the Context of Cyber-Physical System-Networks by Jennifer Brings (14:40-15:20)
Coffee Break (15:30-16:00)
16:00 - 17:30
MoDRE - 7th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RE4SuSy - 6th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Sustainable Systems [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
ESPRE - 4th Workshop on Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering [Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
UsARE - 3rd International Workshop on Usability and Accessibility focused Requirements Engineering [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
CrowdRE - 2nd International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering [Room: 7, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T01 - User Story Best Practices: Requirements in Agile Context (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
T07 - Writing requirements documents with goals: the KAOS/Objectiver approach (Full-day)[Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
T08 - Agile Business Rule Development (Full-day)[CANCELLED]
T10 - Writing Good Requirements (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Improving the Elicitation of Delightful Context-Aware Features: a Data-Based Approach by Rodrigo Falcão (15:40-16:20)
General discussion(16:20-16:40)
Keynote: How to finish that damn PhD by Daniel M. Berry(16:40-17:40)
Tuesday, September 05
8:00
Registration [Lobby area, Building Reitoria]
9:00 - 10:30
Workshops
RELAW - 10th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RePa - 7th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
EmpiRE - 6th Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering [Room: Anfiteatro A, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RET - 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing [Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
AIRE - 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Requirements [Room: 11, Building Polidesportivo]
JIT RE - 2nd International Workshop on Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering: Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements in Agile Software Development [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Tutorials
T02 - Blockchain Requirements Engineering: Research Challenges and Opportunities (Half-day)[Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T03 - From Mining to Planning – Next Generation of Release Decision Making for Software Products (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T04 - Software Reuse and Reusability based on Requirements: Product Lines, Cases and Feature-Similarity Models (Half-day)[Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria]
T06 - Evaluating Evolving Requirements Models with URN: Features, Goals, and Scenarios (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
RE@PT
Room: 7, Building Faculdade de Direito
Industry keynote - by Sarah Gregory
Mini-talks
Coffee Break (10:30-11:00)
11:00 - 12:30
RELAW - 10th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RePa - 7th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
EmpiRE - 6th Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering [Room: Anfiteatro A, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RET - 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing [Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
AIRE - 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Requirements [Room: 11, Building Polidesportivo]
JIT RE - 2nd International Workshop on Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering: Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements in Agile Software Development [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T02 - Blockchain Requirements Engineering: Research Challenges and Opportunities (Half-day)[Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T03 - From Mining to Planning – Next Generation of Release Decision Making for Software Products (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T04 - Software Reuse and Reusability based on Requirements: Product Lines, Cases and Feature-Similarity Models (Half-day)[Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria]
T06 - Evaluating Evolving Requirements Models with URN: Features, Goals, and Scenarios (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
Mini-talks
Lunch (12:30-14:00)
14:00 - 15:30
RELAW - 10th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RePa - 7th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
EmpiRE - 6th Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering [Room: Anfiteatro A, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RET - 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing [Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
AIRE - 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Requirements [Room: 11, Building Polidesportivo]
JIT RE - 2nd International Workshop on Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering: Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements in Agile Software Development [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T03 - From Mining to Planning – Next Generation of Release Decision Making for Software Products (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T05 - Risk Assessment using Early Requirements Models: A Guided Tour (Half-day)[Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria]
T06 - Evaluating Evolving Requirements Models with URN: Features, Goals, and Scenarios (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
Round tables / working groups
Coffee Break (15:30-16:00)
16:00 - 17:30
RELAW - 10th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Law [Room: 129, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RePa - 7th International Workshop on Requirements Patterns [Room: 123, Building Faculdade de Direito]
EmpiRE - 6th Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering [Room: Anfiteatro A, Building Faculdade de Direito]
RET - 4th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering and Testing [Room: 10, Building Polidesportivo]
AIRE - 4th International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence for Requirements [Room: 11, Building Polidesportivo]
JIT RE - 2nd International Workshop on Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering: Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements in Agile Software Development [Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T03 - From Mining to Planning – Next Generation of Release Decision Making for Software Products (Full-day)[Room: Anfiteatro B, Building Faculdade de Direito]
T05 - Risk Assessment using Early Requirements Models: A Guided Tour (Half-day)[Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria]
T06 - Evaluating Evolving Requirements Models with URN: Features, Goals, and Scenarios (Full-day)[Room: Senado, Building Reitoria]
T09 - Eliciting Unstated Requirements (Half-day)[Room: 5, Building Faculdade de Direito]
Panel - Think the future!
Reception (18:30)
Wednesday, September 06
8:00
Registration [Lobby area, Building Reitoria]
8:30 - 9:00
Opening session Chairs: Ana Moreira Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
9:00 - 10:30
Keynote: Requirements Engineering for High Assurance Autonomous Systems in the Face of Uncertainty: A Multidisciplinary Perspective Speaker: Betty Cheng, Michigan State University, USA Chair: Jane Hayes Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Coffee Break (10:30-11:00)
11:00 - 12:30
Research/Industry 1: Simplicity through Social Media? Mining Tweets and App Info
Chair: Jörg Dörr
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Mining Twitter Feeds for Software User Requirements by Grant Williams and Anas Mahmoud
A Little Bird Told Me: Mining Tweets for Requirements and Software Evolution by Emitza Guzman, Mohamed Ibrahim and Martin Glinz
SAFE: A Simple Approach for Feature Extraction from App Descriptions and App Reviews by Timo Johann, Christoph Stanik, Alireza M.Alizadeh B. and Walid Maalej
Research/Industry 1: Simplicity through Social Media? Mining Tweets and App Info
Chair:
Jörg Dörr
Summary:
The session Simplicity through Social Media? Mining Tweets and App Info was a session with 3 research papers and highly interactive Q&A slots after the talks.
The first talk on Mining Twitter Feeds for Software User Requirements was presented by Anas Mahmoud. He presented an approach to analyse tweets and found about 50% of relevant information (bug reports, user requirements) in tweets that were directed to the support organizations of the software development organization. Accuracies of 70% on average were achieved in automatic classification of the tweets. Main points of discussion in the Q&A session were the relationship and benefit to requirements engineering activities, how the approach can be focused to identify tweets related to specific product features and if it in the end will safe effort or replace existing RE. There was consensus, that the newly identified data in tweets offers another channel for requirements engineering, thus complements the existing methods and techniques.
The second talk with the title A Little Bird Told me: Mining Tweets for Requirements and Software Evolution presented by Emitza Guzman was also about analysing tweets, but put the focus on the ranking of the identified requirement information and on usage scenarios of this information in RE. Main topics in the Q&A session was on how the weights for the ranking were determined, and if guidelines for future twitter users could make sense to make the data analysis easier, which is not the preferred way to go to preserve the natural way twitter users interact.
The third talk on SAFE: A Simple Approach for Feature Extraction from App Descriptions and App Reviews presented by Timo Johann and Christoph Stanik described an approach to extract a set of features, both from the app descriptions (e.g. in Facebook) and the reviews users wrote. One main topic in the following Q&A session was how this method could be used in other settings, e.g. using it on tweets to identify the addressed feature so that the previously presented methods can be focused on the features of interest. Another application scenario could be using the approach to extract a feature list from reviews as initial starting point if no requirements specification exists.
Research/Industry 2: Canary in a Coalmine: Argumentation and Rationale Alive and Well?
Chair: Kurt Schneider
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
Canary: Extracting Requirements-Related Information from Online Discussions by Georgi Kanchev, Pradeep Murukannaiah, Amit Chopra and Pete Sawyer
A framework for improving the verifiability of visual notation design grounded in the Physics of Notations by Dirk van der Linden, Anna Zamansky and Irit Hadar
Using Argumentation to Explain Ambiguity in Requirements Elicitation Interviews by Yehia Elrakaiby, Alessio Ferrari, Paola Spoletini, Stefania Gnesi and Bashar Nuseibeh
RE@Next! 1: Relevance & Releases & Privacy
Chair: Sepideh Ghanavati
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
How do Practitioners Perceive the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research? by Xavier Franch, Daniel Méndez Fernández, Marc Oriol Hilari, Andreas Vogelsang, Rogardt Heldal, Eric Knauss, Guilherme Travassos, Jeffrey C. Carver, Oscar Dieste and Thomas Zimmermann
Optimized Functionality for Super Mobile Apps by Maleknaz Nayebi and Guenther Ruhe
A Data Purpose Case Study of Privacy Policies by Jaspreet Bhatia and Travis D. Breaux
RE@Next! 1: Relevance & Releases & Privacy
Chair:
Sepideh Ghanavati
Summary:
The session Relevance & Release & Privacy was a session with 3 research papers and highly interactive Q&A slots after the talks.
The first talk on How do Practitioners Perceive the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research was presented by Xavier Franch. He presented a research study on the relevance of the requirements engineering research to practitioners. The study is a replication of similar studies in software engineering research but the main focus is limited to requirements engineering approaches. So far, the authors captured 418 papers between 2010 to 2015 from the main software engineering venues. They also discuss the approach, the criteria for selecting the practitioners and their elicitation area. Main points of discussion in the Q&A session were related to the feasibility of the study, their methodology, their data set and what result do they expect to achieve.
The second talk with the title Optimized Functionality for Super Mobile Apps presented by Maleknaz Nayebi was about introducing a super mobile app by combining the functionalities from the similar apps in the store using optimization techniques. Main topics in the Q&A session were on the feature extraction process, the main criteria for selecting the features for the super app and the validation of the approach.
The third talk on A Data Purpose Case Study of Privacy Policies presented by Jaspreet Bhatia described an approach to identify and categorize data purposes in privacy policies. The paper uses grounded theory analysis approach to identify purpose from five privacy policies and then classify them into secondary categories. One of main topic in the following Q&A session was about how the method can be applied to other type of legal documents. Another main topic in Q&A was related to the categories of purposes and if the category "implied purpose" can help in identifying and resolving ambiguities.
Lunch (12:30-14:00)
13:00 -14:00
REJ Editorial Board Meeting Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
14:00 - 15:30
Research/Industry 3: Complementarity Achieved? Mining User Feedback
Chair: Anas Mahmoud
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Mining User Rationale from Software Reviews by Zijad Kurtanović and Walid Maalej
Feedback Gathering from an Industrial Point of View by Melanie Stade, Farnaz Fotrousi, Norbert Seyff and Oliver Albrecht
Users — The Hidden Software Product Quality Experts? A Study on How App Users Report Quality Aspects in Online Reviews by Eduard C. Groen, Sylwia Kopczyńska, Marc Hauer, Tobias D. Krafft and Jörg Dörr
Research/Industry 3: Complementarity Achieved? Mining User Feedback
Chair:
Anas Mahmoud
Summary:
Session 3 was a mix research/industry session which included the presentation and discussion of 2 research papers and one industry paper. The first research paper, titled Mining user rationale from user reviews, was presented by Zijad Kurtanovic. The paper described a systematic process for mining user rationale from app store reviews. The paper relies on grounded theory and peer content analysis to capture and interpret various user rationale concepts embedded in the reviews. The Q&A session included questions about specific analysis techniques used by the authors to gather, manually label, and classify the data and the potential value of this type of analysis to other RE tasks.
The second paper presented was the industry paper Feedback gathering from an industrial point of view. The paper was presented by Melanie Stade. In this paper, Stade et al. conducted a case-study on 18 different software companies to understand their user feedback gathering strategies. Through multiple online surveys and interviews, the authors were able to expose several problems in the current state of practice when it comes to gathering user feedback. In particular, while most software companies are aware of the relevance of end-user feedback, most of these companies still do not fully exploit such feedback for software development and evolution. The Q&A session was focused on the qualitative and quantitative analysis techniques used in the paper as well as the importance of communicating our research in the RE community with the industry.
The final paper was a research paper, titled Users – the hidden software product quality expert?. The paper was co-presented by Eduard C. Groen and Sylwia Kopczynska. The paper tackles the problem of mining non-functional requirements, or quality attributes, from mobile app reviews. The authors reported that usability and reliability were the two main quality concerns app users often raise in their feedback. The authors devised a set of 16 linguistic patterns to help automatically classify these concerns in larger datasets of app reviews. The Q&A session was mainly focused on the performance measures presented in the paper. In particular, the audience – mainly Dan Berry – pointed out the importance of emphasizing recall over precision in RE automation tasks.
Research/Industry 4: Simplicity through Knowledge and Association?: Traceability
Chair: Paola Spoletini
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
What Requirements Knowledge do Developers Need to Manage Change in Safety-Critical Systems? by Micayla Goodrum, Jinghui Cheng, Ronald Metoyer, Jane Cleland-Huang and Robyn Lutz
What Questions do Requirements Engineers Ask? by Sugandha Malviya, Michael Vierhauser, Jane Cleland-Huang and Smita Ghaisas
Datasets from Fifteen Years of Automated Software Traceability Research (Current State, Characteristics and Quality) by Waleed Zogaan, Palak Sharma, Mehdi Mirakhorli and Venera Arnaoudova
Research/Industry 4: Simplicity through Knowledge and Association?: Traceability
Chair:
Paola Spoletini
Summary:
The session Simplicity through association and knowledge? Traceability comprised 3 research papers. The first talk, titled What Requirements Knowledge Do Developers Need to Manage Change in Safety-Critical Systems?, was presented by Micayla Goodrum. The talk presented a study which involved almost 20 experienced developers. The study was used to analyze the ways in which developers work through the different artifacts while maintaining safety-critical code and to suggest a way of show them the artifacts and their correlations. The insights proposed as a result of this study are meant to be used to design requirements-based knowledge tools for supporting developers' maintenance tasks. In the Q&A session, there were a few clarification questions about the study and a discussion about the experience in safety critical system of the participants. Micayla pointed out that even if only a few of the participants had experience in safety critical systems at this stage of the research the most important aspect was their experience as developers.
The second talk with the title What Questions do Requirements Engineers Ask? presented by Sugandha Malviya. The purpose of the presented work was to analyze how requirements and business analysts combine information from different sources during the requirements engineering process. Sugandha presented the analysis that her co-authors and she made on real-world queries to understand which questions requirements professionals would like to ask and the artifacts needed to support them. The authors distributed an online survey to requirements professionals in IT and collected 29 survey responses (and 159 natural language queries). Using open coding and grounded theory, these queries were grouped into 9 different query purposes and 54 sub-purposes. The Q&A session has been very lively. A lot of questions were focused on the future use of the information collected with this study. Sugandha explained that the results from the survey could to help in planning the requirements engineering activities by identifying important questions, instrumenting the environment with the needed supporting tools, and strategically collecting data the needed data.
The third talk on Datasets from Fifteen Years of Automated Requirements Traceability Research was presented by Mehdi Mirahkorli. Mehdi illustrated the results of their systematic literature review on the past fifteen years software traceability datasets. In their analysis, Mehdi and his co-authors investigated the characteristics of those datasets, ways to evaluate their quality, the threats to validity associated with those datasets as pointed out by the authors who used them, factors that are associated with their reusability, and the diversity of datasets used in the community. The presentation generated many questions and comments. One of the main topic of the Q&A session was the analysis of the threats to validity associated to a dataset. It has been pointed out by the audience that sometime authors report in them what they believe is expected by the reviewers more than what they truly believe being a threat to validity. Moreover, given the interesting results presented by Mehdi, it has been suggested to deepen in the analysis by correlating some of the currently analyzed dimensions.
Posters and Demos
Chairs: Silvia Abrahão, Jennifer Horkoff
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
UCAnalyzer: A Tool to Analyze Use Case Textual Descriptions by Saurabh Tiwari and Mayank Laddha
Let's Hear it From RETTA: A Requirements Elicitation Tool For Traffic Management Systems by Mohammad Noaeen and Behrouz Homayoun Far
ÉCrits - Visualizing Support Ticket Escalation Risk by Lloyd Montgomery, Emma Reading and Daniela Damian
Deploying a Template and Pattern Library for Improved Reuse of Requirements across Projects by Robert Darimont, Wei Zhao, Christophe Ponsard and Arnaud Michot
Tool support for Automatic Runtime Reappraisal of Weights by Luis Garcia Paucar and Nelly Bencomo
Choosing Requirements for Experimentation with User Interfaces of Requirements Modeling Tools by Parisa Ghazi, Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad and Martin Glinz
ÉCoSTest: A tool for Validation of Requirements at Model Level by Maria Fernanda Granda, Nelly Condori-Fernández, Tanja Vos and Oscar Pastor
DMGame: A Gamified Collaborative Requirements Prioritisation Tool by Fitsum Kifetew, Denisse Munante, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi, Alberto Siena and Paolo Busetta
Canary: An Interactive and Query-Based Approach to Extract Requirements from Online Forums by Georgi Kanchev, Pradeep Murukannaiah, Amit Chopra and Pete Sawyer
A demonstration of Respecify: a requirements authoring tool harnessing CNL by Michael Ledger
Coffee Break (15:30-16:00)
16:00 - 17:30
Research/Industry 5: Secure AND Supportive?
Chair: Neil Ernst
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
The Trouble With Security Requirements by Sven Türpe
Safety-Focused Security Requirements Elicitation for Medical Device Software by Mikael Lindvall, Madeline Diep, Michele Klein, Paul Jones, Yi Zhang and Eugene Vasserman
An Evaluation of Constituency-based Hypernymy Extraction from Privacy Policies by Morgan C. Evans, Jaspreet Bhatia, Sudarshan Wadkar and Travis D. Breaux
Research/Industry 5: Secure AND Supportive?
Chair:
Neil Ernst
Summary:
This session was scheduled at the end of the first day and opposite the RE@25 talk, perhaps accounting for the low numbers of attendees. Nevertheless, we had three excellent presentations, all of whom delighted the session chair by sticking exactly to the time limits, followed by some lively discussion.
Up first, Sven Türpe from Fraunhofer presented his vision of a simpler abstraction of security requirements. He simplified into questions about security design analysis, threat analysis, and the design process, mapping each to a potential tool such as CORAS. His simplification was however challenged by some in the audience on the grounds that once fully realized, his simplification would prove just as complex as previous approaches. Still there was a recognition that for explaining security requirements to industry practitioners, this simpler picture was important, a theme we also heard on Day 2 of the conference.
Next, Mikael Lindvall, Fraunhofer USA, presented their work with the US Food and Drug Administration on infusion pump security. Lindvall made the point that an insecure device is by default an unsafe device. He then showed his approach using Sequence Based Enumeration. This was used to enumerate potentially unsafe usage sequences and show the need for future testing of these paths. The discussion centered around the scalability of this approach, as well as the chance that some of these sequences might be deliberately disordered by an attacker.
Finally, Morgan Evans from Carnegie Mellon presented her work on detecting hyponyms in natural language text derived from online privacy policies. A hyponym is the "specialization" clause in a sentence, e.g. "we gather user data, which includes name, address, ...". Her technique can find these patterns automatically with accuracy of 50% or so on test data. Discussion centered around clarifying what was a hyponym as opposed to a clarification or example, and some instances of difficult to parse natural text, e.g. nested hyper/hyponyms.
Silver Jubilee
Chair: Julio Cesar Leite
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Silver Jubilee
Chair:
Julio Cesar Leite
Summary:
The Session did run as planned. Each speaker talked no more than the time allowed, and each presented their views without any interruption from neither the chair nor the audience. Each presentation was heard in a symphonic silence and highly applauded. After the presentations, the chair opened for questioning and discussion.
The sequence of the presentations was an interesting one, first a theory oriented presentation (Michael Jackson), followed by two focused presentations: one on elicitation techniques (Paola Spoletini and Alessio Ferrari), and another on the interaction with society (Guenther Ruhe, Maleknaz Nayebi), the two last presentations were lessons from history (Roel Wieringa ), and a vision of a possible future (Robyn Lutz) as to reflect on the present.
The questioning was first addressed to the problem of real world modeling; questions were addressed to Michael Jackson who provided more nuances on the already very clear message of the right hand side problem: the modeling of the context/domain knowledge. Other questions were addressed to elicitation concerns, focusing on society in general and the role of software, and, in special, the requirements for it, given this broad context.
Participation on questioning and commenting was a key point, with the audience staying as to the last minute of the session. Most of the presenters did participate in answering.
Overall, I would say that the goal was met and the results were even better than first imaged. All the presentation slides are available on the RE site.
18:00 - 18:30
Steering committee Meeting Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
19:30
Thursday, September 07
8:00
Registration [Lobby area, Building Reitoria]
9:00 - 10:30
Keynote: How Design Thinking Works (@ SAP)[slides] Speaker: Romana Oehmig, Lead Design Thinking & Business Model Innovation, SAP Chair: Barbara Paech Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Coffee Break (10:30-11:00)
11:00 - 12:30
Research/Industry 6: Complexity Reduction via Goals and Reasoning?
Chair: Jennifer Horkoff
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
"SHORT"er Reasoning About Larger Requirements Models by George Mathew, Tim Menzies, Neil Ernst and John Klein
Modeling and Reasoning with Changing Intentions: An Experiment by Alicia M. Grubb and Marsha Chechik
Does Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering Achieve its Goal? by Alistair Mavin, Philip Wilkinson, Sabine Teufl, Henning Femmer, Jonas Eckhardt and Jakob Mund
Research/Industry 6: Complexity Reduction via Goals and Reasoning?
Chair:
Jennifer Horkoff
Summary:
The session saw three excellent papers related to goal models. In the first paper George Mathew presented a method to find the "key" decisions in large goal models. They used large and medium-sized exemplar models from a real project and demonstrated the use of algorithms which had been previously used in AI projects. The process allows one to focus on certain decisions and tells users which decisions in a large model have the most impact.
In the second paper, Alicia Grubb presented a controlled experiment testing the utility of her time-analysis i* framework, previously presented at RE'16. In the study, 16 graduate students were able to successfully use various combinations of reasoning and to identify time-changing concepts. An analysis baseline was used to ensure the students were comparable and to have a baseline for results. Alicia ended with advice for empirically evaluating your own PhD work, which was particularly interseting useful.
In the third paper, we were treated to Alistair and Henning’s rendition of the Spice Girl’s "Wanabee", including an (informative t-shirt-based fashion show). The intention was to motivate their paper analysing the practical effectiveness of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE). They evaluated GORE effectiveness via an analysis of SLR data and an industrial survey. They found that practitioners use the goal conceptualization informally in practice, and several have a general need for GORE, but existing methods are too complex and not meeting their needs. Only a very small percentage of GORE papers (~9/1000) systematically evaluated the effectiveness of their methods with industry. An interesting discussion about the barriers to research transfer took place with the audience.
Data Track 1: Functional vs Non-Functional: Can Both Win?
Chair: Eric Knauss
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
RE Data Challenge: Requirements Identification with Word2Vec and TensorFlow by Alex Dekhtyar and Vivian Fong
Automatically Classifying Functional and Non-Functional Requirements Using Supervised Machine Learning by Zijad Kurtanović and Walid Maalej
What Works Better? A Study of Classifying Requirements by Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad, Oliver Karras, Parisa Ghazi, Martin Glinz, Guenther Ruhe and Kurt Schneider
PURE: a Dataset of Public Requirements Documents by Alessio Ferrari, Giorgio Oronzo Spagnolo and Stefania Gnesi
RE@Next! 2: Elicitation & Security
Chair: Irit Hadar
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
Interview Review: Detecting Latent Ambiguities to Improve the Requirements Elicitation Process by Alessio Ferrari, Paola Spoletini, Beatrice Donati, Didar Zowghi and Stefania Gnesi
Pushing Boundaries of RE: Requirement Elicitation for Non-Human Users by Anna Zamansky, Dirk van der Linden and Sofya Baskin
A Gamified Tutorial for Learning about Security Requirements Engineering by Daniel Alami Cabezas and Fabiano Dalpiaz
Lunch (12:30-14:00)
14:00 - 15:30
Research/Industry 7: Complimentary and Simple Requirements via Social Factors?
Chair: Frank Houdek
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
New Horizons for Requirements Engineering by David Callele, Krzysztof Wnuk and Birgit Penzenstadler
How Much Undocumented Knowledge is there in Agile Software Development? by Shinobu Saito, Yukako Iimura, Aaron Massey and Annie Antón [best industry paper award]
Software Requirements Analyst Profile: a descriptive study of Brazil and Mexico by Angelica Toffano Seidel Calazans, Roberto Avila Paldês, Kiane Mabel Rezende, Emeli Braosi, Nathácia Indayara Pereira, Isabel Sofia Sousa Brito and Eloisa Toffano Seidel Masson
Research/Industry 7: Complimentary and Simple Requirements via Social Factors?
Chair:
Frank Houdek
Summary:
The session Complimentary and Simple Requirements via Social Factors? started with New Horizons for Requirements Engineering presented by David Callele and Krzysztof Wnuk. The presentation encourage us as requirements engineers not only to focus on software or software intensive systems. We as requirements engineers can be beneficial in many other engineer areas as well. We tend to sell us ourselves on short. Additionally, the presentation reminded us to see requirements engineering as something that helps to lower the risk not to come up with the needed product. Requirements engineering is neither an end in itself nor something that can produce correct results.
In the second presentation How Much Undocumented Knowledge is there in Agile Software Development, Shinobu Saito shared observations with us he made at NTT concerning "unissued tickets". An unissued ticket is a code modification that was not made due to explicit requirements that are documented in a ticket. He found that approx. 20% of all commitments to the code repository where due to such unissued ticked. For these, he analyzed the causes and confirmed the hypothesis that a significant portion of these changes is linked to unstated knowledge that will get lost when transferring the software to another group. The Q&A session suggested - beyond other things - to evaluate to which extend this phenomenon is specific to agile software development or if this is not even worse in "traditional" development processes.
Finally, Roberto Paldês presented Software Requirements Analyst Profiles: A Descriptive Study in Brazil and Mexico. In this study, the authors analyzed more than 300 job postings for requirements engineers (or similar titles) and the requested skills, attitudes, and competencies. The study showed that requirements engineer attributes that are typically reported in literature are only partially requested in job postings. It became evident that deeper (and broader) investigations are necessary to understand that phenomenon.
Data Track 2: Simplicity through Specialization?
Chair: Mehdi Mirkhorli
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
A Domain-independent Model for Identifying Security Requirements by Nuthan Munaiah, Andrew Meneely and Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
Toward Automating Crowd RE by Pradeep Kumar Murukannaiah, Nirav Ajmeri and Munindar Singh
The IlmSeven Dataset by Michael Rath, Patrick Rempel and Patrick Mäder
Fishbowl: Future of Data in RE
Panel: RE in the age of continuous deployment
Chair: Nan Niu
Panelists: Sjaak Brinkkemper, Xavier Franch, Jari Partanen, and Juha Savolainen
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Panel: RE in the age of continuous deployment
Chair:
Nan Niu
Summary:
Our panel is scheduled to be right after lunch on the second day of the main conference (Thursday, September 7). The main motivation of organizing such a panel is to explore, and healthily debate, the role of RE in the age of continuous deployment, and in general, continuous * (continuous integration, continuous build, continuous delivery, etc.). Three questions were pre-seeded for the panelists to pitch their positions and draw similarities and differences among the panelists: (1) what is your own view of continuous deployment (CD)? (2) what do you see as the strongest link and the weakest link of CD and RE? (3) what is the most promising synergy of CD and RE in your mind?
The panelists did not disappoint us. The first presentation was made by Juha Savolainen from Danfoss whose answer to the strongest link of CD and RE was simply, 'None'. His view favored speedy delivery and emphasized that agile was not about software development but about doing imperfect RE and receiving fast feedback. Xavier Franch from UPC was our second panelist making his presentation where he rigorously reviewed the literature on continuous * and shared the enthusiasm about data-driven and evidence-based RE in the context of an exciting ongoing project called Q-Rapids. Our next panelist, Jari Partanen, drew his extensive industrial experience and lessons learned in doing agile RE. Finally, Sjaak Brinkkemper from Utrecht University reviewed the market-driven software industry and envisioned a linguistic tooling supporting RE in the age of continuous *.
The audience was very much engaged throughout the Q&A period, highlighted by questions posed by Vincenzo Gervasi, Klaus Pohl, Tanmay Bhowmik, and Pete Sawyer. The last activity of our panel was to use a mobile app called 'db Meter' to collect the audience appreciation so as to award the very first MVP (most valuable panelist) at RE. The inaugural MVP, with tolerable error rate, goes to Juha! Congratulations!
Coffee Break (15:30-16:00)
16:00 - 17:30
Research/Industry 8: Users: The Rosetta Stone of RE?
Chair: Alistair Mavin
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
Improving the Identification of Hedonic Quality in User Requirements --- A Controlled Experiment by Andreas Maier and Daniel M. Berry
Usability Insights for Requirements Engineering Tools: A User Study with Practitioners in Aeronautics by Hélène Gaspard-Boulinc and Stéphane Conversy
Detecting Vague Words & Phrases in Requirements Documents in a Multilingual Environment by Breno Cruz, Bargav Jayaraman, Anurag Dwarakanath and Collin McMillan
A Case Study on Evaluating the Relevance of Some Rules for Writing Requirements through an Online Survey by Maxime Warnier and Anne Condamines
A Case Study on a Specification Approach using Activity Diagrams in Requirements Documents by Martin Beckmann, Andreas Vogelsang and Christian Reuter
The session Research/Industry 9: QUALITY, Simplicity, Complementarity: Pick Two? included three presentations from research and practice. The first presentation, Detecting Vague Words & Phrases in Requirements Documents in a Multilingual Environment, by Breno Cruz, Bargav Jayaraman, Anurag Dwarakanath and Collin McMillan, analyzed how we can reuse existing wordlists for new languages in weak word detection. The talk stirred an interesting discussion that reiterated the importance of context analysis for weak word detection. The open question remains whether we can and should also automatically translate false positive filters.
In the second talk by Maxime Warnier and Anne Condamines, A Case Study on Evaluating the Relevance of Some Rules for Writing Requirements through an Online Survey, the presenters pointed that we must empirically evaluate requirements patterns and cannot just take their advantages for granted. For their part, they asked readers to rate requirements written with different rules and came to the interesting conclusion that expert readers often considered other rules to be high quality than non-expert readers. In the Q&A session the audience discussed whether or not this means that we should leave it to the requirements authors if they want to adapt requirements patterns and let them decide case-by-case.
In the last talk, A Case Study on a Specification Approach using Activity Diagrams in Requirements Documents, Martin Beckmann, Andreas Vogelsang and Christian Reuter presented an analysis of a specific setting where a necessary duplication of visual and textual descriptions in the automotive context lead to many inconsistencies. The authors systematically analysed these inconsistencies and asked the requirements authors how critical they considered these inconsistencies. One of the many interesting findings of this talk was that not all inconsistencies were actually considered problematic by practitioners.
Best paper and most influential paper awards
Chairs: Jane Hayes, Barbara Paech
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
MIP award talks: On non-functional requirements by Martin Glinz
Best paper awards
17:30 - 18:30
Interactive Design Thinking Session by Romana Oehmig Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
Banquet (buses leave at 18:30)
Friday, September 08
9:00 - 10:30
Keynote: Simplicity considered harmful (sometimes) Speaker: Ian Sommerville, University of St Andrews, UK Chair: João Araújo Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Coffee Break (10:30-11:00)
11:00 - 12:30
Research/Industry 10: Specification: When Words Get in the Way?
Chair: Pradeep Kumar Murukannaiah
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
A Formalization Method to Process Structured Natural Language to Logic Expressions to Detect Redundant Specification and Test Statements by Benedikt Walter, Jakob Hammes, Marco Piechotta and Stephan Rudolph
Do words make a difference? An Empirical Study on the Impact of Taxonomies on the Classification of Requirements by Kim Lauenroth, Erik Kamsties and Oliver Hehlert
Requirements Capture and Analysis in ASSERT™ by Andrew Crapo, Abha Moitra, Craig McMillan and Dan Russell
RE@Next! 3: Managing Requirements
Chair: Maya Daneva
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
Exploiting User Feedback in Tool-supported Multi-criteria Requirements Prioritization by Itzel Morales-Ramirez, Denisse Muñante, Fitsum Meshesha Kifetew, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi and Alberto Siena
Juggling Preferences in a World of Uncertainty by Luis Garcia Paucar, Nelly Bencomo and Kevin Kam Fung Yue
Identifying Conflicting Requirements in Systems of Systems by Thiago Viana, Andrea Zisman and Arosha K. Bandara
A Visual Narrative Path From Switching to Resuming an RE Task by Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad, Alex Shymka, Jenny Le, Noor Hammad and Guenther Ruhe
Panel: Context-Dependent Evaluation of Tools for NL RE Tasks: Recall vs. Precision, and Beyond
Chair: Daniel M. Berry
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Lunch (12:30-14:00)
14:00 - 15:30
Research/Industry 11: Easier Said than Done?: Mastering Domain Complexity through NLP
Chair: Walid Maalej
Room: 3, Building Faculdade de Direito
Mining Associations between Quality Concerns and Functional Requirements by Xiaoli Lian, Jane Cleland-Huang and Li Zhang
Legal Markup Generation in the Large: An Experience Report by Nicolas Sannier, Morayo Adedjouma, Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Lionel Briand, John Dann, Marc Hisette and Pascal Thill
Reinforcing Security Requirements with Multifactor Quality Measurement by Hanan Hibshi and Travis D. Breaux
Research/Industry 12: Better Process and Requirements through Fun or Less Interruptions?
Chair: David Callele
Room: Senado, Building Reitoria
Gamifying Collaborative Prioritization: Does Pointsification Work? by Fitsum Meshesha Kifetew, Denisse Munante, Anna Perini, Angelo Susi, Alberto Siena, Paolo Busetta and Danilo Valerio
Behind Points and Levels - The Influence of Gamification Algorithms on Requirements Prioritization by Martina Kolpondinos-Huber and Martin Glinz
Task Interruptions in Requirements Engineering: Reality versus Perceptions! by Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad, Guenther Ruhe and Mike Bauer
Research/Industry 12: Better Process and Requirements through Fun or Less Interruptions?
Chair:
David Callele
Summary:
There were three papers in this session with great audience participation. The first two papers focused on using points to motivate participation in RE efforts. The third paper looked at the effects of interruptions during RE efforts, specifically perceptions vs. reality.
The first paper, Gamifying Collaborative Prioritization: Does Pointsification Work?, presented by Angelo Susi, investigated whether or not the investment in pointsification provided a return on investment. Their goal was to to develop an objective, empirical assessment of techniques that would assist in the transformation from an empirical "try – test – learn" cycle to a more deliberate design guided by "first principles". The experiments were performed in the context of requirements prioritization efforts using a reward system to motivate participants, supported by an automated reasoning system. They concluded that points can work as a motivator as long as the reward rules were transparent to the participants (the participants understood the reward that they would receive for their effort).
The second paper, Behind Points and Levels – The Influence of Gamification Algorithms on Requirements Prioritization, presented by Martina Z. Huber Kolpondinos, investigated the effects of different gamification algorithms on activity levels in online elicitation platforms. These online participation platforms can be used to perform tasks like prioritization using voting techniques. Online users are anonymous and not subject to organizational controls (tasking), how can we motivate participation? Both explicit (receive points for participating) and implicit (receive points based on other’s responses to your posts) point systems were used and motivation was judged based on the number of interactions on the experimental platform. Their work showed that, for their participants, the choice of algorithms within the reward system had a statistically significant effect upon participation.
The final paper, Task Interruptions in Requirements Engineering: Reality Versus Perceptions!, presented by Zahra Shakeri Hossein Abad (and possibly the final paper in the RE conference because we were running a little late due to strong audience participation), investigated the effects of interruptions on RE tasks in an attempt to determine whether the perception of the effect correlated with the reality. This paper is based on a significant data set supplied by an industrial partner and a wide variety of techniques were employed during retrospective analysis and follow up surveys. After significant post-processing and analysis, the authors identified that RE task interruptions were significantly different from other software engineering tasks, that a number of task-switching patterns exist and that self-imposed task switching (particularly in the first half of the work day) was the most costly – despite participant perceptions to the contrary.
Research/Industry 13: Large Software: Beautiful and Simple?
Chair: Michael Panis
Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria
Requirements Engineering Challenges in Large-Scale Agile System Development by Rashidah Kasauli, Grischa Liebel, Eric Knauss, Swathi Gopakumar and Benjamin Kanagwa
What do support analysts know about their customers? On the study and prediction of support ticket escalations in large software organizations by Lloyd Montgomery and Daniela Damian [best research paper award]
Piggybacking on an Autonomous Hauler: Business Models Enabling a System-of-Systems Approach to Mapping an Underground Mine by Markus Borg, Thomas Olsson and John Svensson
Research/Industry 13: Large Software: Beautiful and Simple?
Chair:
Michael Panis
Summary:
The final session of the conference was entitled Large Software: Beautiful and Simple?, though there was little evidence of simplicity. The session began with Eric Knauss presenting his team's work, Requirements Engineering Challenges in Large-Scale Agile System Development. While the title might imply an oxymoron, Eric presented the ways in which 4 companies are applying Agile processes not only to large-scale systems, but also to safety critical systems. His team investigated the challenges they are encountering. Not unexpectedly, these are related to communication and knowledge management, especially with regard to user value and system understanding. The new processes are not bridging the gaps across stakeholders. Neither existing requirements nor agile processes are achieving their potential. The area is ripe for further investigation.
Lloyd Montgomery followed Eric with What do Support Analysts Know about Their Customers? On the Study and Prediction of Support Ticket Escalations in Large Software Organizations. He described a project in which he introduced machine learning based on "feature engineering" to predict which support tickets were likely to result in a customer's escalating a problem. The predictions were based on the customer's perception of the support process, not the actual support the customer was receiving. The results indicated that 80% of a support analyst's workload could be reduced with this predictive software.
Markus Borg ended the session with Piggybacking on an Autonomous Hauler: Business Models Enabling a System-of-Systems Approach to Mapping an Underground Mine. This was a nice bookend to the morning's keynote in which Ian Sommerville pointed out that our discipline goes beyond the technical, involving regulations, culture, governance, organization, other systems, etc. Markus described a case in which he evaluated four different business models for developing an SoS involving autonomous vehicles in a gold mine. Technology was only one of several factors involved in the analysis.
Coffee Break (15:30-16:00)
16:00 - 17:30
Closing session Chairs: Ana Moreira Room: Auditorio B, Building Reitoria