RE in Small Companies (RESC)

A RefsQ Workshop

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RefsQ'10 Workshop

1st Workshop "RE in Small Companies (RESC)"

on 29th of June 2010 at the RefsQ'10 Conference in Essen

 

News

  • The Workshop Agenda is completed! Follow the link to find a detailed workshop program!
  • The Workshop Location is fixed. The workshop location is going to be the Paluno Building (The Ruhr Institute for Software Technology - Gelingstraße 16, 45127 Essen, Germany). More infos on the REFSQ website

 

Workshop Motivation

In the past RE research targeted mainly the needs of RE practice in the context of larger enterprises. However, Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) develop, customize and maintain a considerable part of software. Often, these companies are unable to apply RE methods and techniques without modifications. Besides, shortcomings in applying RE methods due to time constraints or limited resources may arise. 

RE research has to intensify the investigation of RE practices in SMEs. Otherwise SMEs will have to continue their search for methodical orientation and dedicated tool support. Normally, the people responsible for requirements in SMEs are ambitious, but suffer from scarcity of resources. Their time for doing experiments and trying different methods is very limited. They need quick methodical improvement of requirements elicitation, documentation, communication and traceability as well as more continuity of requirements management through the whole software lifecycle. The practiced RE has to adopt the flexibility which is often an essential part of SMEs businesses.

 

Workshop Goals

We know that “RE Researchers should work with practitioners [...], with other SE Researchers and Practitioners [… and] industrial organizations should provide (sanitized) industrial-strength project data to researchers” [1]. Consequently, this workshop is intended to bring researchers together with the RE practices and experience of SMEs whose businesses are software.

The workshop shall isolate current challenges and outline an agenda heading towards solving these challenges. We want to accomplish this by combining industrial experience and scientific practices.

In order to ensure early and iterative evaluation of emerging RE approaches and tool support, useful partnerships between SME practitioners working in various problem domains and researchers may arise from this workshop. 

 

Call For Papers (download)

In order to achieve an intensive exchange between RE researchers and people responsible for requirements management in SMEs both position papers and full papers are highly appreciated, but are not a prerequisite for workshop participation. In preparation for the workshop the accepted submissions will be distributed to all workshop participants. 
 
The following two types of contributions are requested:
 
The focus of this workshop is on Position Papers (3-5 pages): Short papers state the position of the author(s) on any of the topics within the scope of the workshop either from SME or RE research perspective. For example, a position paper from a SME could describe their needs for improving current RE practices in their typical project environment; a position paper form a researcher could describe ideas, visions or simple solutions (tricks) that deal with the RE in SMEs. Position papers will be evaluated based on their practical relevance, potential for generating discussion, and on the originality of the positions expressed.
 
Full Papers (7-10 pages): Full papers describe and report on concepts for and experiences with innovation in the RE practice of SMEs. For example, a full paper could describe a research or practical approach for requirements specification in the context of developing custom software in a SME. Full papers will be evaluated based on the originality and significance of the contribution, the soundness of the validation process, and on the potential for practical applicability of the results in other problem domains.

 

List of Workshop Topics

Participants from (SME) industry will have the chance to characterize their RE practices and illustrate the specific RE challenges arising from their common type of project context. Researchers will have the possibility to present visionary ideas, dedicated methods and concepts for methodical and tool support for RE in SMEs.

 

Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
 
From the SME perspective:

  • How is the common project context of a SME characterized and which special difficulties with RE can be derived from the situation described?
  • What influences SMEs in shaping their requirements management processes?
  • Which practices for eliciting, documenting, communicating and tracking requirements are successfully applied by SMEs? Which practices are rejected and why?
  • What are the difficulties and/or obstacles in adopting requirements approaches to the project work in a SME?
  • What are essential requirements for RE tool support in SMEs?

 
From the RE research perspective:

  • How to simplify methodical innovation and/or improvement for the RE practice in SMEs?
  • Which concepts can help to overcome identified methodical deficiencies resp. obstacles for the application of RE approaches in SMEs?
  • How to integrate RE with all the other activities in the software lifecycle as for example the design of user interaction, the design of software architecture, the implementation and test of software functionalities?
  • How to implement more continuity in the work on requirements in SMEs throughout the whole software lifecycle in SME projects?
  • How to evaluate if developed RE strategies are appropriate for these companies?

 

Important Dates

  • May, 19th 2010 Paper Submission Deadline
  • May, 31st 2010 Notice of Acceptance
  • June, 14th 2010 Camera Ready Paper Version
  • June, 29th 2010 Workshop Date (afternoon)

 

Workshop Agenda

In the first part of the workshop the accepted workshop papers are going to be presented. After each presentation a short discussion is held. We will try to answer some of the questions raised in the CfP within these discussions.

 

In the end or the workshop the RESC PC chairs will give a summary of the lessons learned during the workshop which should lead towards a research agenda. Furthermore we want to point out topics of interest in industry.

 

Please note that this agenda may change.

 

RESC 2010 Workshop Agenda
Time Agenda Who
14:00 Workshop Topics and Agenda Workshop Chairs
14:20 Round of Introduction All
     
14:30 The Benefit of Being Small: Exploring Market-Driven Requirements Engineering Practices in Five Organizations Sami Jantunen

 

 Content: Characterization of and introduction to the way of working in five SMEs  

14:50

 Discussion  
     
15:05 Playing to the strength of small organizations Jorge Aranda
  Content: Questions for research. How to learn from SMEs and what is next?  

15:25

 Discussion  
     
15:40 Coffee Break  
     
15:55 ISO-standardized activities for Very Small Entities Vincent Ribaud and
  Content: Solutions for small companies regarding ISO-Standardization. Philippe Saliou

16:15

 Discussion  
     
16:30 Modelling by Example: Requirements engineering during the bidding stage of dialog-oriented software projects Axel Kalenborn
  Content: Solutions for small companies regarding the bidding phase including a tool presentation.  

16:50

 Discussion  
     
17:00 Short Break  
     
17:10 Workshop Summary & Open Discussion Workshop Chairs
  Content: Resulting research questions, finding where help from industry is needed for research and discussing industries needs. All
     
17:30 Official Workshop ending  
     
20:30
 Dinner*  

 

 

* Not included in workshop fee; we will reverve seats. Please registered by email (thorsten.merten@h-brs.de). More information, soon!


Organizational Committee

Simone Bürsner (email), Thorsten Merten (email)

Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science,
Grantham-Allee 20, 53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany

 

Barbara Paech (email)

Software Engineering, University of Heidelberg
Im Neuenheimer Feld 326, 69120 Heidelberg, Germany

Jörg Dörr (email)

Fraunhofer-Institut für Experimentelles Software Engineering
Fraunhofer-Platz 1, 67663 Kaiserslautern, Germany

 

Programm Committee

  • Jorge Aranda (University of Toronto, Canada)
  • Simone Bürsner (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, St. Augustin, Germany)
  • Jörg Dörr (Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
  • Michael Ehresmann (insiders technologies, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
  • Eva Geisberger (Technische Universität München, Germany)
  • Andrea Herrmann (Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany)
  • Stefan Krause (DCON Software & Service AG, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
  • Thorsten Merten (Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, St. Augustin, Germany)
  • Barbara Paech (Heidelberg University, Germany)
  • Gerhard Pews (Capgemini sd&m AG, Frankfurt, Germany)
  • Ernst Sikora (Duisburg-Essen University, Germany)
  • Andreas Wachowski (XING AG, Hamburg, Germany)

 

 

 

[1] Cheng, B. H. C. & Atlee, J. M.: Research Directions in Requirements Engineering, in 'FOSE '07: 2007 Future of Software Engineering , IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA , pp. 285--303 (2007).  

 

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