Foreword of the Thematic Track: Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering

UALITY is often considered something that must be in conformance to system requirements. However, the latter keeps changing to guarantee business alignment, thus making quality a moving target! Requirements engineering helps stakeholders to elicit their expectancies with respect to systems, to prioritize such expectancies and, ultimately, to reach a common ground with other stakeholders with conflicting requirements. Furthermore, it helps stakeholders from different backgrounds to communicate among them, and with the systems developers. The former are not necessarily interested in the technical details of the implementation of the systems, while the latter are specialized in building systems, rather than on the specific applications of the systems they build. Caught in-between, requirements engineers must also keep up with newer development approaches such as Software Product Lines (SPL), Model Driven Development (MDD), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA).