Welcome to the 6th International Workshop on Requirements Prioritization and Communication (RePriCo'15). The workshop serves as a platform for the presentation and discussion of new and innovative approaches to prioritization and communication issues in requirements engineering. RePriCo'15 takes place on March 23, 2015, in Essen, Germany, co-located with the 21st International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ2015). It is generally accepted that every software development project has to fulfill (at least some) customer needs to be successful. But unless you have unlimited resources like time and budget you have to decide which customer needs to fulfill (first) and which not (or later). This is when requirements prioritization methods appear on the scene and help to rank the requirements. But focusing the future development is not only about applying prioritization techniques. Above all it is a communication process between all relevant stakeholders. Basically, poor communication is responsible for the gaps between the real needs of the customers, the perception of these needs by the Requirements Engineer and the transformation of these perceptions into detailed requirement specifications. Thus, prioritization and communication are strongly intertwined activities lying in the heart of any requirements engineering process. RePriCo'15 aims at bringing together the more formal disciplines of decision support using evaluation methods with the more informal domains of negotiation and collaboration. We want to raise the communities' awareness to the important linkage of communication and prioritization activities in Requirements Engineering. We think that especially these activities hold a great potential of mutual enrichment as well as of contributing to new innovative research actions. We are glad about holding RePriCo'15 for the sixth time. After co-location with the 22nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE14) in Karlskrona, Sweden last year we now return to our former and proven location at REFSQ in Essen. The participants from research and industrial practice always appreciated the fruitful discussions in an open-minded and pleasant atmosphere. Since 2010 we had all in all 24 papers published within the RePriCo workshop series.
This year we have two full research papers and one short experience report presented within RePriCo’15. The submissions comprise findings from various fields: Kai Petersen and Nauman Bin Ali investigate the requirements selection phase, i.e. the decision between relevant and irrelevant requirements using selection procedures from systematic literature reviews. Thorsten Merten, Bastian Mager, Paul Hübner, Thomas Quirchmayr, Barbara Paech, and Simone Bürsner describe communication processes in distributed software development with focus on the usage of issue tracking systems in four Open-Source Projects. Pierre Erasmus and Maya Daneva report on their experience with the effort estimation driven by quality requirements in six ERP projects.
We are convinced that the workshop will be rewarding like in previous years and findings in these proceedings encourage researches as well as software developers, requirements engineers, or consultants to absorb new ideas and carry them out into their daily work and research projects.
Our special thanks go to all program committee members, speakers and participants for their contributions to the workshop. Additionally, we would like to thank Raimundas Matulevicius and Thorsten Weyer as the REFSQ2015 workshop chairs. Last but not least we thank Sixten Schockert and Annika Lenz for their effort in organizing RePriCo’15. We are confident in hosting RePriCo in 2016 once more and are looking forward to welcoming many participants again.
The workshop website for the RePriCo series including links to the previous RePriCo workshops can be found here: http://www.bwi.uni-stuttgart.de/reprico. 2
Program Chairs Prof. Dr. Georg Herzwurm, University of Stuttgart, Germany Prof. Dr. Wolfram Pietsch, Aachen University of Applied Sciences, Germany