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The article discusses the IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). This issue contains an introduction of the best papers presented during the conference on requirements activities in the fields of systems and software engineering. The conference was held at the University of Paris 1-Pantheon Sorbonne.

Requirements engineering (RE) has attracted a great deal of attention from researchers and practitioners in recent years. Requirements engineering education (REE) is therefore an important undertaking if the field is to have professionals who are capable of successfully accomplishing software projects. This increasing interest demands that academia should provide software engineering students with a solid foundation in the subject matter. This paper aims to identify and to present the current research on REE that is available at present, and to select useful approaches and needs for future research. A systematic mapping study was therefore performed to classify the selected studies into five classification criteria: research type, empirical type, contribution type, RE activity, and curricula. A total of 79 papers were selected and classified according to these criteria. The results of this systematic mapping study are discussed, and a list of advice obtained from the REE literature for instructors is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an explicit definition of green software requirements and a tool to support their evaluation . The proposed evaluation tool describes the green efficiency by considering the energy consumption as the main aspect to be studied during the development stage. This approach consists of building a multiple regression model, by using a supervised learning algorithm, in order to reproduce the energy consumption pattern of devices at different workload circumstances. The energy consumption model is then deployed to estimate the impact of software applications based on their resource usage. Our work has been validated on desktop and mobile devices. The experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed energy profiling tool that provided relevant information on the energy consumption of software applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model transformation is one of the basic principles of Model Driven Architecture. To build a software system, a sequence of transformations is performed, starting from requirements and ending with implementation. However, requirements are mostly in the form of text, but not a model that can be easily understood by computers; therefore, automated transformations from requirements to analysis models are not easy to achieve. The overall objective of this systematic review is to examine existing literature works that transform textual requirements into analysis models, highlight open issues, and provide suggestions on potential directions of future research. The systematic review led to the analysis of 20 primary studies (16 approaches) obtained after a carefully designed procedure for selecting papers published in journals and conferences from 1996 to 2008 and Software Engineering textbooks. A conceptual framework is designed to provide common concepts and terminology and to define a unified transformation process. This facilitates the comparison and evaluation of the reviewed papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Model transformation is one of the basic principles of Model Driven Architecture. To build a software system, a sequence of transformations is performed, starting from requirements and ending with implementation. However, requirements are mostly in the form of text, but not a model that can be easily understood by computers; therefore, automated transformations from requirements to analysis models are not easy to achieve. The overall objective of this systematic review is to examine existing literature works that transform textual requirements into analysis models, highlight open issues, and provide suggestions on potential directions of future research. The systematic review led to the analysis of 20 primary studies (16 approaches) obtained after a carefully designed procedure for selecting papers published in journals and conferences from 1996 to 2008 and Software Engineering textbooks. A conceptual framework is designed to provide common concepts and terminology and to define a unified transformation process. This facilitates the comparison and evaluation of the reviewed papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human context within which a software system will operate is fundamental for its requirements. It may not appear to be very much related to the system, but it is very relevant in achieving its successful adoption. However, requirements engineers have usually a background in Software Engineering and are not trained to elicit this kind of information. This situation raises the need for analytical tools to deal with these features. These tools should enable collaborative work between requirements engineers, who use them in development, social practitioners, who provide the knowledge and processes underlying these tools, and the customers, who know the domain and intended application of the projects. The framework presented in this paper is based on the socio-psychological Activity Theory and its analysis of human contexts. It includes a repository of social properties and a process to perform this elicitation using it. The paper illustrates its application through a case study on the impact of a new system in the organization of a firm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large-scale software applications are complex systems that involve a myriad of different concerns. Ideally, these concerns should be organized into separated and different modules, but often some of these concerns overlap and crosscut each other. Such a situation is problematic, as concerns are tangled and scattered into different modules; thus, design and source code become difficult to produce and maintain. The Modularity community has been addressing crosscutting concerns by developing techniques based on separation of concerns. This separation must be done as early as possible during software construction to obtain a more modular and consequently better maintainable software, where evolution is performed with less effort and the possibility of introducing unforeseen mistakes is minimal. In this paper, we propose a strategy to identify crosscutting concerns at requirements level, i.e., at early stages in the software development process, by using the Language Extended Lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The desired principle of separation of concerns in software development can be jeopardized by the so-called crosscutting concerns, which tend to be scattered over (and tangled with) the functionality of the modular units of a system. The correct identification of such concerns (and their encapsulation into separate artifacts) is thereby considered a way to improve software understanding and evolution. Pursuing a proper management of concerns from the requirements engineering stage can greatly benefit the entire software life-cycle. In this paper, we propose conceptual guidelines on how to perform the identification of crosscutting concerns in the process of building requirements specifications. We argue that the identification must be carried out in an incremental way, to encapsulate apart the crosscutting concerns even if they have not emerged completely yet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Requirements Engineering (RE) conference in the year 2004. It is noted that RE '04 theme is a requirement for design and innovation in a changing world and reflects both the increasingly critical environment. Three papers presented in the RE '04 conference include purchasing and integrating COTS software products based on interoperability requirement, importance of goals and scenarios, and security requirement.