Home

The Sixth Edition of the Requirements Engineering Track (RE-Track'13) is part of the 28th ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC 2013), hosted by Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra (IPC) Institute of Systems and Robotics, University of Coimbra (ISR-FCTUC) Mathematical and Computer Sciences Institute, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil (ICMC-USP); to be held at the Institute of Engineering of the Polytechnic Institute of Coimbra (ISEC-IPC) - Portugal.

Requirement Engineering is defined as the branch of Software Engineering concerned with the real-world goals for, functions of, and constraints on software systems; it is also concerned with the relationship of these factors to precise specifications of software behaviour and to their evolution over time and across software families. Requirements Engineering is increasingly recognized as a critically important activity in any systems engineering process.

Requirements engineering is increasingly recognized as a critically important activity in any systems engineering process. The arising of many complex software applications in many multidisciplinary domains, the speed with which they need to be developed, and the degree to which they are expected to change, all play a role in determining how the systems development process should be conducted. Independently of the nature of the software, the elicitation, analysis, negotiation, specification, validation and management of requirements are fundamental for the development of quality in complex software. Only by fully understanding stakeholders' needs, and documenting them in a concise, and unambiguous way, can consistently deliver quality products designed to meet the complexities of our advanced information society.

However, there area number of inherent difficulties in the RE process. The existing methods for requirements specification are far from being completely satisfactory. Requirements must be measurable, testable, related to identified business and other field needs or opportunities, and defined to a level of detail sufficient for system design. The demand for better, faster, and more usable software systems will continue, and RE will therefore continue to evolve in order to deal with different development scenarios which must be considered. Besides that, many new areas are being investigated by requirements engineering community (such as: aspect-oriented or agents-oriented development, COTS-based systems, use of simulation techniques, autonomic system) to achieve better ways for leading with the involved complexity.

The objective of this track is to explore different advances in requirements engineering in a general way and its relation with different areas, reducing the gap between software engineering solutions and the way one specific domain of knowledge was seen up to given point.