Workshop Proceedings

Workshop Objectives:
Understanding and quantifying value, cost drivers and quality attributes of software systems early in a project is a key to project and product success. While the use of early cost and effort estimates sounds common sense, it is hard to establish a requirements- and value-based measurement process as part of the larger processes of requirements engineering and early project management. The goal of this workshop is to identify and foster opportunities for leveraging early quantitative and qualitative information about a product and/ or project, so that project success is repeatable and predictable. We will provide an interactive forum for both scientists and professionals to discuss their experiences and advance the state-of-the-art research and practice. We focus on requirement-based measurements from the perspective of both requirements engineers and project managers. Specifically, the workshop addresses the challenges of which measures to use during the collaboration of RE and PM, how early measurements make a difference to project and/or product success, which problems are encountered in day-to-day work and which solutions practitioners and researchers propose for improving early decision-making processes that are critical to project and product success.

Possible workshop themes include, but are not limited to:

• Value-oriented requirements engineering
• Measuring and predicting business value and customer benefit of software projects and/or products
• Early functional size measurement models
• Early estimation of effort, cost, and duration
• Assessment of software quality attributes
• Requirements prioritization, RE decision-making, and requirements triage
• Requirements-based project management
• Business case development
• Proposal writing
• Risk assessment and mitigation during requirements engineering
• Progress tracking and quality control based on requirements
• Requirements volatility, change management and consistency management, especially for iterative projects
• Quantitative knowledge management and communication

The workshop targets two types of contributions:

• Research contributions: Case studies, empirical research results, hypothesized models, and suggestions about how to improve the collaboration of requirements engineering and project management, by using suitable measurement.
• Experience contributions: Experiences, practiced solutions and problem statements at the interface of requirements engineering and project management.

• Best Practices setting up and using requirements measurements that both requirements engineers and project managers can use to increase the chances of success for their projects and products.
• Identification of open research questions and hypotheses as a basis for further research.

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Agenda

Morning Session

09:30-10:00	Welcome; each participant presents him/herself.
10:00-11:00	Risk assessment and cost estimation session (20 minutes presentation, 10 minutes discussion)
	* Heiko Stallbaum, Andreas Metzger: "Employing Requirements Metrics for Automating Early Risk Assessment" (PDF)
	* Sherif M. Tawfik, Marwa M. Abd-Elghany, Stewart Green: "A Software Cost Estimation Model Based on Quality Characteristics" (PDF)
11:00-11:30	Coffee break
11:30-13:00	Project management session
	* Michael Eisenbarth, Jörg Dörr: "Facilitating Project Management by capturing Requirements Quality and Volatility Information" (PDF)
	* Eric Knauss, Thomas Flohr: "Managing Requirement Engineering Processes by Adapted Quality Gateways and critique-based RE-Tools" (PDF)
	* Korbinian Herrmann: "Roundtrip Roadmapping: From the Roadmap to the Model and Back Again" (PDF)

Afternoon Session

15:30-16:00	* A.V. Miranskyy, N.H. Madhavji, R. Ferrari, S. Ghobrial, C.D. Giaraffa, Q.A. Rahman: "Requirements Escalation" (PDF)
16:00-17:00	Non-functional requirements session
	* Thomas Olsson, Richard Berntsson Svensson, Björn Regnell: "Non-functional requirements metrics in practice - an empirical document analysis" (PDF)
	* M. Kassab, O. Ormandjieva, M. Daneva: "Towards a Scope Management of Non-Functional Requirements in Requirements Engineering" (PDF)
17:00-17:30	During the final discussion, we will synthesize the ideas of the papers and workshop participants, and identify open questions for further research.

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The workshop invites participants, researchers as well as practitioners from industry, who are responsible for, involved in, or interested in requirements measurement and use of measurement data in requirements engineering or project management. A fifty-fifty mix of industry and research participants would be ideal for the exchange of knowledge and ideas in both directions.

The workshop is open to all Mensura participants.

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We accepted two types of submissions, position papers and technical papers. Both types of papers should treat a topic from the themes section above.

• Position papers (2-6 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 a case study in industry. Position papers will be evaluated based on their potential for generating discussion, and on the originality of the positions expressed.
• Technical papers (6-15 pages) Full papers either describe working experience at the interface of requirements engineering and project management or the results of a research effort. There will be online proceedings on the workshop website. One of the authors must present their accepted paper at the workshop.

All paper submissions were reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.

Authors are requested to present their accepted paper at the workshop.

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Important dates:

15th July 2007	Paper submission
7th September 2007	Notification of authors
25th September 2007	Camera-ready papers
6th November 2007	Workshop

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