Multimedia Requirements Engineering

Name of Workshop

Fourth International Workshop on

Multimedia and Enjoyable Requirements Engineering (MERE'11) —

Beyond Mere Descriptions and with More Fun and Games

Tuesday, August 30th, 2011

Trento, Italy

Call for Papers (PDF) / Call for Papers (plain text)

News

The pre-workshop dinner on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 7:30 p.m. (at restaurant Antico Pozzo; Via Giannantonio Manci, 45; 38122 Trento) will be sponsored by Siemens. Register now for MERE!

Program

Previous Workshops

1. MeRE'06, colocated with the 14th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'06) http://www.mere-workshop.org/RE06/
2. MeRE'07.de, colocated with the Conference on Software Engineering, Hamburg, Germany (SE 2007) http://www.mere-workshop.org/SE07/
3. MERE'08, colocated with the 16th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'08) http://www.mere-workshop.org/RE08/

Abstract

MERE strives to make requirements engineering more engaging, desirable and rewarding in order to increase its impact on the value creation chain. Improving the interactions and interactivity between stakeholders will allow requirements engineers to accommodate a more diverse audience, thereby facilitating improved input to requirements development as early and often as practical. As communication can occur in forms other than written or spoken natural language, such as facial expression or gesture, we draw inspiration for processes and representations from domains as diverse as the movie and game industries, storytelling, improvisation theater, industrial design, marketing, and media production. MERE provides an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to exchange new and innovative ideas relating to challenges in the domain.

Topics

Topics of interest include experience papers, method descriptions, emerging technologies, "best" or "worst" practices, research proposals, evaluations, and comparisons that focus on innovative uses of games, multimedia, or other fun concepts (e.g. improvisation, storytelling, and play) in requirements engineering practice and training. Typical topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• The role of multimedia or games in pre-requirements and post-requirements specification activities;
• Media languages/techniques for requirements engineering;
• Use of real-world physical devices for rapid prototyping in support of requirements elicitation and negotiation;
• Semiological modeling of requirements;
• Multimedia-based requirements development/analysis/specification;
• Game-oriented requirements development/analysis;
• Approaches to the teaching and training of requirements engineering using gameplay and other multimedia;
• Multimedia techniques and tools to facilitate the evolution of representations.

We explicitly seek proposals from participants who would like to run an interactive or gameplaying session during the workshop, of maximum duration one hour. These sessions may take one of the following forms:

• The demonstration of media-centric techniques or tools in requirements engineering;
• Novel techniques for the interactive exploration of a problem space amongst participants;
• The hands-on use of emerging research techniques or technologies within the scope of the topics;
• A requirements engineering training exercise or game.

Additionally, we encourage requests to perform well-formulated and feasible interactive evaluative studies with workshop participants, so long as they are within the scope of the workshop and show sufficient potential to be focused, yet fun!

Goals

High-quality requirements are an important precondition for successful system development. Novel ways to produce high-quality requirements that add value to the entire system development lifecycle are needed. One approach is to encourage a more playful and enjoyable creative process for requirements engineering, both in the training and conduct of its practices, thus increasing the intrinsic motivation for doing a good job. Another approach is to reflect the creativity and vision of requirements engineers in the resulting specifications, transporting ideas on many levels of abstraction and addressing a diverse audience.

We believe that more support is needed in these "softer" and more "representational" areas of requirements engineering. This workshop shall provide an opportunity to exchange new and innovative ideas on how to use multimedia, games, or other innovative concepts to make requirements engineering activities and artifacts more engaging and effective. The workshop will build upon the discussions in earlier, well-received Workshops on Multimedia Requirements Engineering (MeRE'06 and MeRE'07.de), with a particular focus on exploring the value that can arise from elevating the Enjoyment factor (as first introduced in MERE'08).

Targeted Attendees

• RE researchers working on the development of media or game-based RE tools, techniques, and methods;
• RE researchers and practitioners investigating the deployment of the products of the above RE research in industry;
• RE practitioners with experiences in the selection of RE tools, techniques, and methods for specific projects;
• RE trainers seeking to explore and gain feedback on innovative media or game-based ideas.
• A background in pedagogy, semiology, game- or communication-design would be a plus!
• The workshop will be open to attendees without workshop papers to enable anybody who is interested in gaining new ideas for practice and training to participate in and contribute to the interactive sessions.

Workshop Format

The format of MERE'11 will provide attendees with an opportunity to become familiar with emerging topics and establish a good foundation for discussions about new concepts in requirements engineering. We intend to make the workshop discussion- and interaction-oriented. Brief paper presentations will be used to provoke discussion and participants will break out into small groups for more detailed discussion. These small groups will be organized around common themes or goals identified either from the papers or by the participants during the workshop, and around interactive sessions which will be solicited in the call for papers. At the end of the day, there will be a plenary session where the groups report back to the workshop as a whole on the results of their experiences and discussion. Results may be used as a basis for continued publications and future work.

This workshop will provide a collaborative session in which lateral thinking about requirements engineering is facilitated and some suspension of disbelief is expected. The intention is to explore the value of enjoyment and the role of varying media forms as a way to seed high-quality efforts and results in requirements engineering. It is driven by a passion of the workshop chairs to make requirements engineering more 'fun' and engaging for all stakeholders. To complement the perspective of the previous workshops, this year the workshop also aims to investigate the special requirements engineering needs of media-rich systems (like video games, mobile applications, and social media). The workshop will be used to identify future work, issues, problems and priorities, and to propose recommendations around these dimensions for future requirements research.

Paper Evaluation

Position papers (3-5 pages) Short papers, stating the position of the author(s) on any of the topics within the scope of the workshop. For example, position papers could describe experiences with a particular game, tool, technique or method. Position papers will be evaluated based on their potential for generating discussion, and on the originality of the positions expressed.

Proposal papers (3-5 pages) Short papers proposing an interactive session within the scope of the workshop. Proposal papers should describe the objectives for the session, required participants and participation, outline the intended session and the expected outcomes, and clarify the anticipated contribution of the work to requirements engineering. Proposal papers will be evaluated based on their potential for engendering fun amongst the participants, learning by all the parties involved, and on the likely contribution of the effort towards making requirements engineering a more enjoyable experience.

Full papers (8-10 pages) Full papers either describing the experience of comparative evaluation, or reporting on the results of such evaluation. For example, a full paper might describe how a comparative evaluation of media-based RE techniques was performed in practice, either by controlled experiments in the lab or in industrial settings; or it may present the results of running RE games in lab-based experiments, field trials or in practice.

We will make plans to publish the accepted workshop papers in the IEEE CS Digital Library.

Important Dates

Submission deadline: 6th June 2011

Notification to authors: 30th June 2011

Camera-ready submissions: 21st July 2011

All deadlines are 23:59 Apia, Samoa time.

Program Committee

Joy Beatty, Seilevel, USA

Bernd Bruegge, Technische Universitt Mnchen, Germany

Paul Grnbacher, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Andrea Herrmann, Technische Universitt Braunschweig, Germany

Heinrich Humann, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt Mnchen, Germany

Filippo Lanubile, University of Bari, Italy

Seok-Won Lee, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA

Lin Liu, Tsinghua University, China

Alistair Mavin, Rolls-Royce Goodrich Engine Control Systems Ltd., UK

Stephen Morris, City University, UK

Michael Olschimke, DataRoxx, Germany

Bhavani Palyagar, Ignite Intelligence, Australia

Birgit Penzenstadler, Technische Universitt Mnchen, Germany

Martin Purvis, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Asarnusch Rashid, FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik Karlsruhe, Germany

Donna Rhodes, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

Steve Russell, Siemens Corporate Research, USA

Mark Sampson, Siemens PLM, USA

Organizers

Dr. Oliver Creighton

Siemens AG

Corporate Technology (CT)

Otto-Hahn-Ring 6

D-81730 München, Germany

Oliver is Requirements Engineering Program Manager at Corporate Technology, Siemens AG. His responsibilities include consulting, training, and further developing requirements engineering techniques for several operating units within Siemens. He received his diploma in computer science from Technische Universität München in 2001 and his doctoral degree with distinction on a video-based requirements engineering technique in 2006. He is co-author of the book "Open-Source-Software" published in 2004 by Springer-Verlag. His research interests include requirements & development techniques, knowledge modeling, and cinematic communication.

David Callele, Ph.D.

TRLabs Saskatchewan

111 - 116 Research Drive

Saskatoon, SK, CAN, S7N 3R3

David is Saskatchewan Business Development Manager for TRLabs, a Western Canadian research, development, and professional services consortia. David's responsibilities include identifying commercialization opportunities for new technologies, technology forecasting, forging strategic partnerships for economic development, identifying business opportunities, business and technology mentorship, and requirements engineering leadership. David's research focus is on effective requirements engineering in the creative (preproduction) phase of video game development and on managing the transition between preproduction and production efforts.

Olly Gotel, Ph.D.

Independent Researcher

New York City, NY 10014, USA

Olly has been active in the area of Requirements Engineering for the past 20 years and holds a PhD from Imperial College, University of London, on Requirements Traceability. In addition to academic research and teaching positions in the UK and US, Olly has held senior positions within the UK defense industry working on Systems Requirements Engineering and currently serves on the Steering Committee of the New York City Software Process Improvement Professional Network. Olly was the co-author of the most influential paper over a 10-year period from the 1st Conference on Requirements Engineering held in 1994. Since those very early days, Olly has been trying hard to make the discipline more fun ... one recent example was by bringing the RE Next Top Model Show to RE'09 (with Jane Cleland-Huang)!

Sponsors

SIEMENS