1st International Workshop on Quality Requirements in Agile Projects

August 21st, 2018 - Banff, Canada

Co-located with RE'18

Strategic management of software quality demands for appropriate integration of quality requirements (QRs) into the whole software and engineering life-cycle. However, despite the competitive advantage of ensuring and maintaining high quality levels, software development methodologies still prove to offer little support for the integration and management of QR. This is especially true for, and essential in, agile software development (ASD) projects.

The workshop on Quality Requirements in Agile Projects (QuaRAP) aims at investigating the current challenges that ASD teams face when dealing with QRs in their projects and at proposing new solutions to integrate QR into ASD. In tune with this year’s conference theme, submissions demonstrating and discussing the practical impacts (e.g., reduced time to market, reduced maintenance efforts, faster reaction on customer issues) are particularly welcome.

Topics of the workshop will include, but are not limited to:

Data-driven elicitation of quality requirements e.g. in context of:

Repository and app store mining.
Market analyses, e.g. via survey research.

Assessing the impact of including or discarding quality requirements on high-level factors (product quality, business value, …).
Documentation of quality requirements in ASD-specific artefacts such as backlogs.
Implications of quality requirements on ASD practices.
Measuring adherence to quality requirements.
Reason about not adhering to quality requirements.
Connecting QR metrics to QR patterns.
Derive measures from measuring QRs.
Integrate QR generation with agile process
Automatize QR elicitation, propagation, and “controlling”

QuaRAP is co-located with the 26th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'18), Banff, Canada, 20-24 August, 2018.

Important Dates (All deadlines are Anywhere on Earth, AoE):

Abstract submission (except for practitioner messages): June 5th, 2018 NEW: 15th June
Paper submission deadline: June 12th, 2018 NEW: 19th June
Notification to authors: July 6th, 2018 NEW: 10th July
Camera ready paper: July 17th, 2018
Workshop day: August 21st, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS

picture_as_pdf

QuaRAP welcomes five types of submissions:

Technical papers describe beyond state-of-the-art methods, tools, or techniques in support of the management of QR or aspects of it in agile context. Ideally, they report empirical evidence. A paper of this category should be 6-8 page long.
Experience reports describe (industrial) first-hand experience with, and lessons learned about, the management of QR or aspects of it in agile context, i.e., lessons learned that would be useful to be added to the workshop’s body of knowledge. A paper of this category should be 6-8 page long.
Emergent research papers, describe research endeavours in the topics of the workshop that have just started. Preliminary findings without fully-fledged validation are welcome. A paper of this category should be 3-4 page long.
Vision papers, are expected to describe new directions to follow in managing QR in agile context. Convincing arguments supported by clear rationale need to be included. A paper of this category should be 3-4 page long.
Practitioner messages. Industry participants are particularly invited to submit their views on the topic of the workshop. For example, an informal report on how they deal with QRs, or a notice of a project in which something went particularly well (or wrong), or a wish-list for their agile practices in relation to QR management. A contribution of this category should be 1-2 page long.

Remember:

Submit through EasyChair.

Please strictly adhere to the conference general formatting rules.

All papers will be peer-reviewed by three members of the Program Committee.

Program Workshop QuaRAP'18

SESSION 1

09:00 - 09:15 Opening. Introduction of participants
09:15 - 10:00 Keynote: Practical Lightness: Agility and Quality Requirements in Startup Companies. Daniela Damian
10:00 - 10:30 Paper presentation. Definition of the On-Time Delivery Indicator in Rapid Software Development. Martí Manzano, Cristina Gómez, Claudia Ayala, Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Prabhat Ram, Pilar Rodríguez and Marc Oriol

SESSION 2

11:00 - 11:30 Paper presentation. Mining Security Requirements from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures for Agile Projects. Wentao Wang, Arushi Gupta and Nan Niu
11:30 - 12:00 Paper presentation. Security Requirements Engineering in the Agile Era: How it Happens in Practice?. Maya Daneva and Chong Wang
12:00 - 12:30 Paper presentation. How do Practitioners Manage Quality Requirements in Rapid Software Development: A Survey. Lidia Lopez Cuesta, Jari Partanen, Pilar Rodríguez and Silverio Martínez-Fernández.

SESSION 3

14:00 - 14:45 Keynote: How to get a Handle on these Slippery Quality Requirements?. Joerg Doerr
14:45 - 15:15 Open space for attendees' statements (a.k.a. Presentations on-the-fly)
15:15 - 15:30 Identification of discussion topics

SESSION 4

16:00 - 17:00 Open discussion in working groups
17:00 - 17:15 Summary of discussions
17:15 - 17:30 Conclusions of the workshop. Plans for the future

Keynotes

Daniela Damian, University of Victoria, Canada.

Bio: Daniela Damian is a Professor of Software Engineering in University of Victoria’s Department of Computer Science, where she leads research in the Software Engineering Global interAction Laboratory (SEGAL, thesegalgroup.org). Her research interests include Software Engineering, Requirements Engineering, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Empirical Software Engineering. Her recent work has studied developers’ socio-technical coordination in geographically distributed software projects, stakeholder management in large software ecosystems, as well as requirements practices in startup companies. Daniela’s research methodologies involve extensive field work and in-situ studies of software teams through collaborations with large and small software organizations. Daniela has served on the program committee boards of several software engineering conferences, as well as on the editorial boards of Transactions on Software Engineering, the Journal of Requirements Engineering, the Journal of Empirical Software Engineering, and the Journal of Software and Systems.

Title: Practical lightness: Agility and Quality Requirements in Startup Companies

Abstract: In this talk I will present from our recent investigation of RE practices in 16 startup companies as they grow and introduce new products and services. Startups present a special -- more extreme -- case of agility in the software process and market penetration. They operate in a dynamic environment, with significant time and market pressures, and rarely have time for systematic requirements analysis. Attention to quality requirements in particular is non-existent at first, when speed of product release takes precedence over its quality. As the startup scales up to deliver to more clients and market segments, quality however becomes top priority in a startup's journey to survival in the market. We found that startups's approach to evolve their requirements practice is of pragmatical lightness, or flexibility, in their evolution towards an "engineering" of requirements. The second part of the talk will discuss the case of data privacy requirements, in light of the recent needed attention to GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance requirements. A closer look into three of the companies in our study reveals some of the strategies, both technical and process-related, employed by these companies.

Joerg Doerr, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany.

Bio: Dr. Joerg Doerr heads the Information Systems division at the Fraunhofer Institute Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Prior to that, he headed the Requirements and Usability Engineering department. His work areas include all software engineering areas for information systems, with a special focus on requirements engineering, especially non-functional requirements. He received his master of science and his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, Germany. He leads diverse trainings, and industrial technology-transfer and research projects. He is lecturer at the University of Kaiserslautern, author of more than 70 peer reviewed publications and member in many international and national program committees.

Title: How to get a handle on these slippery quality requirements?

Abstract: Dealing with quality requirements (QRs) is a challenging task. This holds for traditional software engineering and unfortunately, this also holds for agile approaches. Empirical Studies from a decade ago even showed that it can get worse in agile settings. This keynote starts with highlighting the typical reasons why dealing with QRs is so difficult. It presents proven best practices for handling QRs that worked in traditional settings and discusses which of them work in agile settings and which don't. But this keynote also takes a different angle: the new agile and DevOps settings do not only impose new challenges for QRs, they also offer new opportunities. So how can we make use of them? For this, ideas, concrete approaches and first empirical results for dealing with QRs in very different ways are presented. One facet is deriving them with Crowd-RE approaches like using emoji analysis, usage analysis, or text mining of app reviews/social media information. They promise benefit for so called run-time qualities like usability and performance. But how about the poor development time qualities like maintainability? The keynote will close with a personal perspective on open research challenges.

Organisation

Xavier Franch, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
Andreas Jedlitschka, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Daniel Méndez Fernández, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Markku Oivo, University of Oulu, Finland

Program Committee

Claudia Ayala, UPC, Spain
Christian Bandes, QualityMinds, Germany
Kristian Beckers, Siemens CT, Germany
Barry Boehm, U. Southern California, USA
Jan Bosch, U. Chalmers, Sweden
David Calelle, Experience First Design, Canada
Carlos H. Duarte, BNDES, Brazil
Carles Farré, UPC, Spain
Smita Ghaisas, Tata Consultancy Services, India
Cristina Gómez, UPC, Spain
Liliana Guzmán, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Kim Laueroth, ADESSO, Germany
Emmanuel Letier, U. College London, UK
Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Marc Oriol, UPC, Spain
Jari Partanen, Bittium, Finland
Pilar Rodríguez, U. Oulu, Finland
Andreas Vogelsang, Technical University of Berlin, Germany
Stefan Wagner, University of Sttutgart, Germany
Qing Wang, ISCAS, China
Yong Xia, HSBC, China

Accepted Papers

Lidia Lopez Cuesta, Jari Partanen, Pilar Rodríguez and Silverio Martínez-Fernández. How do Practitioners Manage Quality Requirements in Rapid Software Development: A Survey

Wentao Wang, Arushi Gupta and Nan Niu. Mining Security Requirements from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures for Agile Projects

Maya Daneva and Chong Wang. Security Requirements Engineering in the Agile Era: How it Happens in Practice?

Martí Manzano, Cristina Gómez, Claudia Ayala, Silverio Martínez-Fernández, Prabhat Ram, Pilar Rodríguez and Marc Oriol. Definition of the On-Time Delivery Indicator in Rapid Software Development