Call for Papers

Overview

Following the success of the previous two International Workshops on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering (CERE), we are pleased to announce the third International Workshop, CERE'05, to build on the progress made so far. This year we will focus on the relationships and integration of theory, methods and practice in RE.

The need to assess the effectiveness and impact of RE research has been a growing concern within the RE community. The basics are known and have been investigated in previous CERE workshops. There are now many signs that research in RE is becoming mature enough that the community can begin to make detailed comparative evaluations of alternative techniques. Different types of research will have differing impacts and hence will require differing evaluation criteria, especially considering the range of research from theory to methods, tools, frameworks, formalisms and ethnographic studies. In this CERE workshop we will broaden the mission of previous workshops by explicitly considering how to assess the contributions and validity of different types of RE research. For example, in RE processes it may be necessary to assess the nature of process improvement that can be claimed by objective performance data, benchmarking against standardised problems, and evidence of use in industrial practice. In contrast, RE theories, models and formalisms may be assessed by the insights they bring, use by others in the community and citation indices. This workshop will aim to develop deeper understanding about not only different types of RE research and their validation, but also their integration. If we succeed, the workshop will produce a roadmap of RE research from theory to application, with its validation, that builds on previous taxonomies. Following the overwhelming success of the first two CERE workshops held in Monterey and Kyoto, this workshop seeks to foster a community initiative in shaping future directions for RE.

At CERE'05, there will be presentations of results from current research and discussion of next steps. To this end, we are seeking position papers and technical papers along the themes of the workshop.

Themes

• Research method and research validation in RE:
  • To review and improve RE research taxonomies and methods.
  • To investigate the relationships between different types of RE research and the means of validating each type of research.
• The role of comparative evaluation in RE:
  • Classifying different types of RE research and assessing their relative contributions to advancing RE knowledge or practice.
  • Establishing the necessary consensus on how to compare research results.
  • Identifying strengths and weaknesses of various comparative evaluation approaches.
  • Determining sub-areas in RE ready for comparative evaluation with appropriate evaluation approaches, criteria, generality, etc.
• Reporting on the results of empirical studies and comparative evaluation of RE techniques, methods and tools.

Format

CERE will be a discussion-oriented workshop to promote interaction and exchange of ideas among participants. In the first half of the workshop, there will be presentations and discussion of submitted papers. During the afternoon, we will synthesize the ideas and examine the way forward for comparative evaluation. Papers will be reviewed by an international program committee and together with reports on the afternoon sessions will be published in printed proceedings.

Submissions

We will be accepting two types of submissions, short position papers and full technical papers. Both types of papers should tackle one of the topics or questions from the Themes section above. Submissions will be accepted through the CERE'05 web site (http://www.di.unipi.it/CERE05).

• Position papers (4-6 pages). Short papers, stating the position of the author(s) on any of the topics within the scope of the workshop. For example, positions papers could describe experience with a particular research evaluation method, or could propose an assessment of RE research. From an industrial perspective, papers could report barriers to introducing and validating new methods/tools.
• Technical papers (10-12 pages). Full papers either describing frameworks/methods for RE research, experience of comparative evaluation, or report on the results of such evaluation. For example, a full paper might describe how a comparative evaluation of RE techniques was performed in practice, either by research labs or in industrial settings; or it may present the results of the actual performance of RE tools, methods or processes, in lab-based experiments or in field trials.

Important dates

Organisers