High Impact Requirements Engineering

Abstract

Despite undoubted success in the last two decades, requirements engineering (RE) needs a better alignment between its research focus and its practical grounding. The RE environment now involves elements that were not there 20 or 30 years ago. First, the economics of RE has changed. Large business and technical systems need more rigorous analysis of Return-on-Investment (ROI), but time horizons for ROI have reduced to 18 or 20 month made feasible by massive reuse. Second, there is practically no greenfield software development anymore; RE acts more like Janus, the ancient Roman god of gates-with one face looking at new business and technological challenges and opportunities; and another face gazing at legacy technological, organizational, social and political environments. Third, the scaling towards IT-supported ecosystems results in exceedingly complex and non-linear dynamic dependencies between system components and their natural, technical and social environment-"green IT" being just one of the buzzwords that characterize this trend. Fourth, agility and time to market, low-cost iterative design or even end-user development have become critical factors that lead to the search for new trade-offs between efficiency, openness, and flexibility during requirements capture. Increased outsourcing and offshoring require disciplined evolution and management of specifications as a basis for delegation. Fifth, RE cuts across other forms of design, including industrial design (e.g., pervasive applications), media design (e.g., e-commerce and entertainment), interaction design (e.g., new modalities of interaction), and business environment design (e.g., open business platforms). In summary, a new systematic Science of Design Requirements Engineering is needed, with systematic processes and strict empirical grounding, as proposed, e.g., in the Design Science initiative advocated by Al Hevner in a recent interview for this journal. In June 2007 and October 2008, we organized two international workshops in Cleve-land, Ohio, and Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, to deepen this debate, supported by the US National Science Foundation and the German DFG. Summarizing intensive debates (Lyytinen et al. 2009 and Jarke et al. 2008) the group involved in the design of the workshops identified four key principles that underlie future requirements processes and influence their successful resolution (Jarke et al. 2010): (1) the intertwining of requirements and contexts, (2) the co-evolution of designs with their ecologies, (3) the dominant role of architectures, and (4) novel ways to control complexity. Each of these will call for new research approaches and design principles inviting the RE community to think carefully their research priorities. The good news associated with this shift is that the importance of RE continues to grow as the arguments and rationale for it are broadening. But, the bad news is that besides the need for a business case for a decent ROI within a shorter time frame, in future RE we need to consider additional viewpoints such as the need for the alignment with business process, understanding organizational capabilities, systematizing customer expectation management, ensuring legal protection against IPR loss or contract violation suits, creating user buy-in, and minimized training costs when justifying your next RE project. The need for interdisci-plinary intellectual exchange between diverse communities will further grow along with the observed need for increased diversity in the design of software-intensive systems. This issue of the BISE journal represents a continuation of this debate, with a strong focus on the bridge between RE theory and practice in complex settings. Upon an open call for papers, we received nineteen submissions. After rigorous review and revisions , four research papers and one state-of-the-art review were accepted for publication. Leite and Cappelli introduce the concept of "software transparency": by goal and dependency modeling customers and users can continuously follow the evolution of software from an RE perspective, thus supporting the intertwining of requirements and design as well as effective evolution. Such a perspective gains additional importance in the complex context of offshore development; Wiener and Stephan propose reverse presentations of the software as a means to facilitate communication in this complex global software development setting, whereas Overhage, Skroch and Turowski define more general success factors for RE methods in offshore development setting, Business & Information Systems Engineering 3|2010 123