Panel on Requirements Engineering for Services COMPSAC 2009
Colette Rolland, Éric Dubois, Xiping Song, Eric Yu, Lin Liu · 2009
Requirements engineering (RE) has emerged as a critical area in software and systems engineering, as many systems fail due to poorly understood, ill-defined or ill-conceived requirements. Many of RE concepts and techniques could potentially be applied to service based systems engineering, with the benefit of systematic methods and scientific inquiry. However, service orientation introduces many new challenges and the panel aims to provide a forum for interactive discussions about these challenges. Description Obviously, many of the concepts, techniques and approaches developed in the RE community shall be applicable to the development of service based applications. However, service orientation as the emerging network computing paradigm poses new questions and challenges to the RE community. Service providers and service users interact much more closely. Knowledge is created and exchanged among customers and suppliers. Instead of a single set of requirements on a technical system, there are networks of providers and users, each with requirements and expectations on each other – some based on tacit social conventions, and each with requirements on their technical IT systems. Service design and operation often proceed in parallel, as new knowledge and experiences are incorporated into service systems and processes on an ongoing basis. Automated processes are richly interwoven with human action, decision, and judgment. Some of the interactions will adhere to open standards, while others may be informally negotiated. There are highly dynamic on-the-fly network configurations as well as long-term stable relation. The panel aims at exploring these characteristics of service based development and their impact on RE. Topics that are covered include: • The dominant concern in RE is to move from requirements to code whereas the dominant concern in service based development is composition/configuring/coordinating services. How to adapt RE approaches to deal with this dominant concern in service based development? • Goal driven RE (GORE) proved to be an effective way to support the discovery of requirements. SOA and SOC provide effective solutions at a low, technical level. How to develop a goal driven view of services and reconcile it with the prominent software view of today?