Requirements Management – Novel Perspectives and Challenges

This report documents the program and the outcomes of Dagstuhl Seminar 12442 “Requirements Management – Novel Perspectives and Challenges”. Changes in computational paradigms and capabilities that draw upon platform strategies, web services, and virtualization of both application services and development platforms have significant implications for views of modularity and requirements evolution, complexity of RE tasks, and the economics of system development and operations. The aim of the seminar was to bring together experts from multiple fields to discuss models and theories around these changes. Three key challenges and associated solution ideas were addressed, namely (1) to better deal with context changes and business goal management to reduce the “black swan” rate of badly failed large projects, (2) to exploit recent theories of technological and institutional evolution to understand better how to control complexity and leverage it for innovation at the same time, and (3) the demand for runtime re-organization of existing large-scale systems with respect to new operational goals such as energy efficiency. Future RE must see itself as the marketplace where responsibility for all these complexities and evolutionary steps is traded. Seminar 28.–31. October, 2012 – www.dagstuhl.de/12442 1998 ACM Subject Classification D.2.1 Requirements, D.2.2 Design Tools and Techniques, D.2.11 Software Architectures