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As researchers and teachers and practitioners, we "software types" excel at multitasking. This, in part, led us to ask the question: Can one attend a software engineering conference and do something good for society? We found the answer to be a resounding yes. In this article, we present our first experience of running RE Cares, a conference collocated event. This event included a workshop, conference sessions, and a hackathon for developing an application to support emergency field activity for Mutual Aid Alberta, a nonprofit organization coordinating natural disaster responses in the Canadian province.

Since the 1980s, requirements engineering (RE) for information systems has been performed in practice using techniques (rather than the full method) from Information Engineering (IE) such as business goal analysis, function{ and process modeling, and cluster analysis. Recently, these techniques have been supplemented with portfolio management, which looks at sets of IT projects and offers fast quantitative decision-making about continuation of IT projects. Today's networked world, though, poses challenges to these techniques. A major drawback is their inability to adequately specify the requirements for IT systems used by businesses that provide services to each other in a value web. In this paper, we analyze this problem, and propose a solution by coupling IE and portfolio management with value-based RE techniques at the business network level. We show how these techniques interrelate, and illustrate our approach with a small example.

[Context & motivation] Market-oriented development involves the collaboration of many stakeholders that do not necessarily directly interact with a given development project but still influence its results. These stakeholders are part of the requirements value chain for the concerned software product. [Question/problem] Understanding the structure and functioning of requirements value chains is essential for effective stakeholder management and requirements engineering within the software product’s ecosystem. [Principal ideas/results] The paper explores and exemplifies fundamental concepts that are needed to characterize and reason about requirements value chains. [Contribution] This characterization is used to describe the relevant knowledge landscape and to suggest research avenues for understanding the principles needed for managing requirements-based stakeholder collaboration.

Customers, product managers, project leaders, architects, engineers, and other stakeholders are negotiating requirements throughout the software lifecycle. Even-though fundamental for understanding requirements engineer-ing, negotiation has not been as thoroughly studied as other facets of this engineering discipline. This paper casts requirements engineering into the landscape of negotiation by describing a framework for selecting tactics and methods for various negotiation constellations that can be encountered in a software organization. The framework opens perspectives that are essential for understanding the behavior of people involved in development projects, for understanding how development teams and stakeholders create mutually satisfactory solutions, and for giving tactical advice to practitioners.