Requirements engineering depends on effective communication across the boundaries between discourse communities (e.g. users, marketing people, developers, testers, and domain experts), but the treatment of communication in the RE community does not fully recognize the potential contribution of rhetorical theories. The broad aim of this workshop is to foster the development of a research community and a community of practice that integrates theories of rhetoric into communication of requirements. The short-term goal is to bring together researchers, scholars and practitioners to exchange preliminary research results and practical experiences.
This workshop will explore ways in which requirements communications (in the broadest sense of that term) are and should be accomplished given various communicative goals. We want to question the fundamental assumptions that communicating requirements must involve the writing of "requirements documents" or "specifications" and investigate issues such as the following:
- When to describe user goals and objectives rather than specify technology functions.
- The role of user stories, envisioned usage scenarios and narrative descriptions of technology to replace or augment specifications of desired behavior.
- How and when to describe constraints such as co-existing technology, work practices and regulations that are not going to be re-implemented but affect the interpretation of any description of the technology under discussion.
- The interplay between diagrammatic/textual and formal/prose descriptions in all requirements-related communication.
- The interplay between descriptions of what is and what will be.
- The role of ephemeral communications that leave a permanent trace (such as prototype demonstrations and archived slide presentations).
- Customization of requirements communications to different audience communities.
- Reviewing, critiquing, and evaluating communicative effectiveness.
Targeted attendance
We invite participants with the following research and practice interests:
- RE languages, documentation and models
- Human-centered computing needs analysis
- Business-oriented system planning and objectives
- Computational rhetoric and argumentation structures
- Technical writing and presentation skills
We want to ensure that the research and practice communities are represented at the workshop.
To promote effective discussion, we intend to limit the participation to 15-20 individuals who will be selected by invitation based on submission of a short position paper.
Organizers
| Colin Potts (potts@cc.gatech.edu) | Karen Head (khead@gatech.edu) |