Call for Papers

How should we assess progress in Requirements Engineering research? As a young, multi-disciplinary field, we still lack broad consensus on research methodologies and evaluation criteria, yet we need to do comparative evaluation of our research efforts if we wish to mature as a scientific discipline and ensure effective technology transfer of our research results.

CERE'07 will examine the research methods we currently use in RE, investigate how we can improve our ability to evaluate and compare our research results, and seek to identify how we can assess the impact of comparative evaluation on the maturation of RE.

Overview

We are pleased to announce the Fifth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering (CERE'07). CERE'07 will build on the progress in advancing the case for comparative evaluation in RE that has been made over the last few years and which has been both reported and stimulated by the previous four, very successful, CERE workshops.

The need to assess the effectiveness and impact of RE research is widely accepted within the RE community. The 2003–2006 CERE workshops championed empirical evaluation of RE research by promoting the detailed comparative evaluations of alternative RE techniques. In this CERE workshop we will investigate CERE's traditional themes of RE research methods and validation, comparative evaluation in RE and the role of theory in supporting comparative evaluation. We seek papers in all these areas, especially reports of empirical studies and comparative evaluations of RE techniques, methods and tools. One of our specific goals in CERE'07, however, is to assess how far the discipline has come during CERE's lifetime. We will be keen to see if we are able to evaluate the extent to which the CERE community's efforts to make the use of comparative evidence routinely used in RE have been a success. We can measure success both in terms of how embedded the ideas have become in the RE community, and the extent to which these ideas are improving RE research and practice. Our agenda is ambitious but we hope we can begin to amass evidence for CERE's usefulness.

Building on the advances achieved in earlier CERE workshops, CERE'07 will seek to further build a community initiative in shaping future directions for RE research and evaluation.

CERE'07 will mix presentations of results from current research with discussion of next steps, along with retrospective looks at how far we've come. We seek submissions of both technical and position papers on the following themes:

• Requirements engineering theories
  • identifying existing RE theories and how theory can inform comparative evaluation in RE.
• Research methods and research validation in RE
  • reviewing and improving RE research taxonomies and methods.
  • investigating 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.
  • analyzing the overall impact on RE research standards and expectations.
• Empirical studies and comparative evaluation of RE techniques, methods and tools.

Important Dates

Format

CERE'07 will be a discussion-oriented workshop to promote interaction and exchange of ideas. The first half of the workshop will consist of 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. Accepted papers will be published in web-based proceedings, together with reports of the afternoon sessions.

Submissions

Please follow the instructions at: http://www.di.unipi.it/CERE07/authors.html

Types of Submission

• Position papers (4-6 pages) Short papers should state the position of the author(s) on any of the workshop's themes. For example, a position paper might propose a particular theory in RE for comparative evaluation or might give an industrial perspective on barriers to introducing and validating new methods or tools.
• Technical papers (10-12 pages) Full papers should describe frameworks for RE research, RE theories to aid in comparative evaluation, comparative evaluation experiences, or report the results of such evaluations. For example, a full paper might describe how a comparative evaluation of RE techniques was performed in practice, or it might present the results of the actual performance of RE tools, methods or processes.

Organising Committee