SOCCER'11
Service-Oriented Computing: Consequences for Engineering Requirements

Workshop co-located with the 19th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference

LUCIANO BARESI1, LILIANA PASQUALE1, NEIL MAIDEN2, and JAMES LOCKERBIE2

1 Politecnico di Milano, Milano - Italy
2 City University, London - United Kingdom

The objective of this workshop is to host significant and high-quality contributions in all topics related to requirements engineering for service-oriented software, with the goal of letting participants gain insights into the current state of the art and future challenges, create synergies through integration, and foster cross-cooperation. Besides building a community, the main result will be the continued development of a research agenda to guide and support researchers in the field.

Topic
Software-based systems are changing. There is increasing interest in autonomic and self-* systems that are dynamic and flexibility based on new capabilities to self-reconfigure and self-resolve anomalous situations. Currently these capabilities are delivered using services, and in particular web services, using a service-oriented approach. Web services are the natural evolution of conventional middleware technologies to support Web-based and enterprise-level integration, but the paradigm can also serve as basis for other classes of systems. For example, it can be applied to support all systems which require a high degree of flexibility and dynamism to discover available functionality at run-time and to negotiate its quality parameters dynamically. This is the case, for example, for ambient computing and automotive applications that need to cope with changing (evolving) configurations. The dynamic nature of these systems precludes the a-priori identification of the components that define the system and demands for the run-time discovery and composition of such services.

To realize a service-oriented architecture we need techniques to identify and specify requirements on services in a machine-interpretable way to enable the dynamic composition and deployment of systems that meet the expectations of the different stakeholders. We need new capabilities to monitor the behavior of deployed systems and reasoning on partial matches, deviations, and corrective actions. We need to be able to exploit the availability of services to discover new opportunities that improve existing requirements processes and techniques. And finally, we need to be able to configure systems from different types of services, including web services, software components and hybrid services that include human intervention.

The workshop will enable communities that work on requirements and service-oriented applications to meet together and share their knowledge to set appropriate theoretical foundations, define special-purpose methodologies for requirements elicitation, and develop supporting technology. The workshop also aims at promoting research directions on requirements engineering for the class of applications that require autonomic and self-managing systems.

Contributions
Authors are expected to submit full papers of approximately 5,000 words and position papers of approximately 2,000 words. Full papers will be reviewed by 3 PC members and position papers by 2 PC members. Proceedings will be available on a workshop web-site available to delegates prior to the workshop, then published in the IEEE Digital Library. All submissions should be submitted using IEEE Conference Proceedings format. We will explore the possibility of having a special issue on some indexed journal if we receive a sufficient number of high-quality workshop submissions.

Covered Topics
A non-exclusive list of topics of interest is:
- Discovering services that comply with requirements specifications
- Languages, models and methodologies for requirements elicitation and specification
- New service-based requirements processes and techniques in systems engineering processes
- Quality aspects of self-adapting systems
- Run-time monitoring of system requirements and QoS
- Requirements based service composition
- Requirements based services monitoring
- Requirements for context-aware systems
- Requirements for adaptivity and adaptability
- Requirements for ambient computing
- Requirements for QoS
- Requirements for multi-channel applications
- Security requirements
- Service-level agreement
- Service outsourcing
- Specifying systems with dynamically changing boundaries
- Autonomous, self-managing systems

Important Dates
- Submission of papers: Thursday 12th May 2011, 18.00 CET
- Notification: Friday 24th June 2011
- Camera-ready versions: 18th July 2011
- Workshop date: 29th August 2011

Program Committee
- Xavi Franch, UPC Barcelona, Spain
- Paolo Giorgini, Information Engineering and Computer Science Department (DISI), University of Trento, Trento, Italy
- Andreas Metzger, Paluno, University of Duisberg-Essen, Germany
- Ita Richardson, LERO - the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre, Limerick, Ireland
- Camille Salenisi, Universite de Paris 1 Sorbonne, Paris, France
- Angelo Susi, IRST - Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
- Kos Zachos, City University London, United Kingdom