Bridging Knowledge Gaps

When Enrico Fermi withdrew the control rods from Chicago Pile-1 in December 1942, there was some uncertainty about what would happen next. Just as with the first nuclear reactor, complex system development often goes ahead with incomplete knowledge. Sometimes we cannot afford to wait until we know everything we would like to know. Sometimes we need to build the system to find it out.

The theme of RE'12 is how requirements engineers handle uncertainty; uncertainty about customer priorities, run-time contexts likely to be encountered, how the requirements will change over time, and so on. Computer systems are required to operate in increasingly complex business, human, social and physical environments. Characterizing uncertainty and mitigating its effects are key challenges for modern requirements engineering.

We invite papers that address all facets of RE, from elicitation to validation, from formal to informal, from large to small, and across people-centric, business-centric and system- centric viewpoints.
Topics of Interest include but are not limited to:

Requirements elicitation, analysis, documentation, validation and verification
Requirements specification languages, methods, processes and tools
Requirements management, traceability, viewpoints, prioritization and negotiation
Modeling of requirements, goals and domains
Formal analysis and verification
Prototyping, simulation and animation
Evolution of requirements over time, product families and variability
Relating requirements to business goals, architecture and testing
Social, cultural, global, personal and cognitive factors
Domain-specific problems, experiences and solutions
Requirements in service-oriented environments
Software product management (incl. topics such as requirements valuation, requirements for product lines, release planning, road-mapping, product life-cycle management as it pertains to requirements, and market focus).

Workshop proposals due: January 30th, 2012
Tutorial proposals due: May 28th, 2012
Posters and tool demos due: June 4th, 2012