IJIS/Special Issue on Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering

Introduction
Practical experiences show that requirements are always incomplete and inconsistent because software systems are complex that developers can hardly fully capture during the system development. User requirements are often expressed in general and qualitative terms which are imprecise in nature and usually conflicting with each other. Therefore, how to elicit, specify and satisfy requirements, including functional and nonfunctional requirements, is always a major concern in engineering software.

In recent years, goal-driven approaches have attracted an increasing attention in the area of requirements engineering, as goal information is valuable in identifying, organizing and justifying software requirements. The tenet of goal-driven approaches is to provide the motivation and rationale to justify software requirements, especially on why systems are constructed. Benefits of focusing on the notion of goals in the requirements engineering process include: (1) helping acquire requirements by elaborating what requirements are required to support the goals; (2) making easy the justification of the presence of requirements in a progressive manner by starting from system-level and organizational objectives from which such lower level descriptions can be progressively derived; and (3) providing the information for detecting and resolving conflicts that arise from multiple viewpoints among stakeholders.

The main objective of this special issue is to report recent high-quality research on the field of goal-driven requirements engineering (GDRE) from both software engineering and computational intelligence perspectives.

Scope
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):


 * goal-driven requirements elicitation and modeling
 * goals, scenarios, and business process modeling
 * goals in software architecture and design patterns
 * goals and aspects
 * requirements traceability and management for GDRE
 * change management, versioning and view management for GDRE
 * software measurement for GDRE
 * verification and validation for GDRE
 * visualization and tool support for GDRE
 * software engineering process and organization for GDRE
 * industrial experiences and empirical studies
 * other novel approaches and lifecycle models

Important Dates

 * October 25, 2008	Submission Deadline
 * April 15, 2009	Reviews Completed
 * June 15, 2009	Final Manuscripts Due
 * TBD (2009)	Publication Date

Submissions
Only original papers written in English, which have not been submitted elsewhere, will be considered for publication. All papers submitted will be subject to a thorough peer review process.

Authors should aim at papers of 20-25 pages in the final format and submit their papers electronically, in portable document format (pdf), by sending an email with subject "IJIS submission" and the file of the paper as an attachment, to the guest editor:

Prof. has guest editor::Jonathan Lee Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering National Central University yjlee@selab.csie.ncu.edu.tw

Please include the following information in plain text in the body of the email:
 * paper title
 * authors' names and affiliations
 * contacting information of the corresponding author
 * abstract of the paper