Ana Moreira (FCT/UNL, Portugal)

The ICT industry has to live with frequent technology change, increase in complexity and pressures of time-to-market. These issues set huge challenges to software development and, consequently, to requirements engineering. Requirements engineering encompasses a structured set of activities to elicit, analyze, specify, validate and maintain a requirements document. The purpose of requirements engineering is to ensure that the final product, or product family, fulfills customer and user needs. Requirements engineering helps to elicit stakeholders’ expectations, to prioritize such expectations and to reach a common view with other stakeholders with conflicting requirements. Additionally, it helps stakeholders from different backgrounds to communicate among themselves, and with the systems developers. Thus, successful software development requires effective requirements engineering, while acknowledging the different needs of internal and external stakeholders. A fundamental challenge for ICT companies is that requirements for products typically change during product development.

While papers by Plösch et al. and Bittencourt et al. address the need for systematic techniques to elicit quality requirements, the paper by Merz, et al. concentrates on testability by proposing abstract verification scenarios, therefore reducing the number of test cases needed for validation. Checking verification scenarios is performed automatically by a model checker. The work by Vale et al., on the other hand, identifies and rates personal skills required by requirements analysts. Thus, it is not surprising that communication abilities are required in a varied number of situations that range from conveying a message to different interlocutors, including in conflicting situations, to being able to listen.

Analysis and specification of requirements can be done using a multitude of approaches. Many of these approaches have been proposed in the context of Software Engineering and range from a number of different paradigms. However, it is well-known that these approaches should not ignore the organizational goals. The paper by Guedes and Vicari specifies a UML profile that comprises typical organizational artifacts, such as goals and plans, as well as typical software engineering artifacts, such as use cases, classes and messages. The paper by Santos et al. and the one by Ferreira and Silva both tackle the behavioral part of a system. While the first uses the model-driven paradigm to increase software systems quality through scenario modeling, the second surveys approaches, techniques and languages for specifying system behavior.

Frequently, quality is seen as being conformant to system and stakeholders’ requirements. The work proposed by Kuziemsky et al. proposes a five-step approach to leverage goal models and performance indicators to access health care information systems.

In summary, the track on Quality ICT Requirements Engineering accepted eight papers for presention and discussion. We are grateful to all the authors who submitted their work to this event and are willing to share their experiences with the QUATIC participants. A special word of thanks is due to the program committee members, who, at very short notice, accepted the challenge to become part of this team. This track would not have been possible without their dedication in evaluating the papers, writing reports and contributing to the discussion. Each research paper was reviewed by at least three referees.

We gratefully acknowledge the contributions and support of all who were involved in the organization of QUATIC 2010. Finally, we wish to thank you, the participants, for your support. We trust you will find this program interesting and thought-provoking.

• Chair - Ana Moreira (FCT/UNL)

• Local Co-Organizing Chair - David de Almeida Ferreira (INESC-ID)

• Ana Maria Moreno (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain)
• Daniel Amyot (Université d’Ottawa, Canada)
• Daniel Berry (University of Waterloo, Canada)
• Elisa Baniassad (Chinese University of Hong Kong, China)
• Gustavo Rossi (Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina)
• Jaelson Castro (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil)
• Jean Michel Bruel (University of Toulouse, France)
• Maria Jose Escalona (Universidad de Sevilla, Spain)
• Nan Niu (Mississippi State University, USA)
• Ruzanna Chitchyan (Lancaster University, UK)

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