The objective of this workshop is to host significant and high-quality contributions in all topics related to requirements engineering for service-oriented software, with the goal of letting participants gain insights into the current state of the art and future challenges, create synergies through integration, and foster cross-cooperation. Besides building a community, the main result will be the continued development of a research agenda to guide and support researchers in the field.

Software-based systems are changing. There is increasing interest in autonomic and self-* systems that are dynamic and flexibility based on new capabilities to self-reconfigure and self-resolve anomalous situations. Currently these capabilities are delivered using services, and in particular web services, using a service-oriented approach. Web services are the natural evolution of conventional middleware technologies to support Web-based and enterprise-level integration, but the paradigm can also serve as basis for other classes of systems. For example, it can be applied to support all systems which require a high degree of flexibility and dynamism to discover available functionality at run-time and to negotiate its quality parameters dynamically. This is the case, for example, for ambient computing and automotive applications that need to cope with changing (evolving) configurations. The dynamic nature of these systems precludes the a-priori identification of the components that define the system and demands for the run-time discovery and composition of such services.

To realize a service-oriented architecture we need techniques to identify and specify requirements on services in a machine-interpretable way to enable the dynamic composition and deployment of systems that meet the expectations of the different stakeholders. We need new capabilities to monitor the behavior of deployed systems and reasoning on partial matches, deviations, and corrective actions. We need to be able to exploit the availability of services to discover new opportunities that improve existing requirements processes and techniques. And finally we need to able to configure systems from different types of services, including web services, software components and hybrid services that include human intervention.

The workshop will enable communities that work on requirements and service-oriented applications to meet together and share their knowledge to set appropriate theoretical foundations, define special-purpose methodologies for requirements elicitation, and develop supporting technology. The workshop also aims at promoting research directions on requirements engineering for the class of applications that require autonomic and self-managing systems.

Contributions  (Call for papers)

Authors are expected to submit their position papers of approximately 5,000 words to the organizers. Submissions should be sent by email attachment (PDF format) to baresi <at> elet.polimi.it. Papers will be reviewed by the PC members. Proceedings will be available in the form of technical report during the conference.