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 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 guiding 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.

CERE'07 will include a keynote address by Professor Steve Easterbrook, University of Toronto, and a mix of presentations of results from current research with discussion of next steps, along with retrospective looks at how far we have come. 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 comparative evaluation.

Note: Researchers interested in empirical evaluation may also be interested in the Empirical Research Methods in RE Tutorial offered by Professor Steve Easterbrook on Monday, October 15th, which will be an excellent introduction to the subject.