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Keynotes

We are proud to announce three superb keynote speakers for RE'06:


Keynote 1:
End Users Who Meet Their Own Requirements
Mary Beth Rosson (Pennsylvania State University, USA)
Wednesday, September 13, 9:00
Thursday, September 14, 9:00

Slides of the talk

Abstract: Over the past 25 years, user interface designers and usability engineers have studied and refined human-computer interaction techniques with the goal of improving people's productivity and experience. One result is an increasing number of tools designed to help end users build or customize software solutions for a variety of everyday problems -- from email filters, to spreadsheet simulations, to interactive web applications.
How far can end users go in meeting their own software requirements? Given the right tools, people and organizations may be able to rapidly develop solutions to a huge number of context-specific computing requirements, eliminating the wait for IT professionals to analyze and engineer a solution. But is this a good thing? End-user programmers are not trained in software engineering or computing paradigms. They have little intrinsic motivation to test their constructions for even basic concerns like correctness or safety. In this talk I argue that the transformation of end users into software developers is well underway and discuss the prospects for maximizing the benefits to society while addressing the risks.

Biography: Mary Beth Rosson is Professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at The Pennsylvania State University. She received a PhD in experimental psychology in 1982 from the University of Texas. Prior to joining Penn State's College of IST in 2003, she was a professor of computer science at Virginia Tech for 10 years, and a research staff member and manager at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center for 11 years. Rosson was among the earliest researchers to study the psychological issues associated with the object-oriented paradigm, and spent many years developing and evaluating object-oriented tools and training for professional programmers. One of her abiding interests has been the interplay between the concerns of human-computer interaction and software engineering. Recently she has been studying the tools and practices of end-user developers in educational and general business contexts.
For many years, Rosson has been an active participant in both the software engineering and the human-computer interaction research communities. She served as the Conference Chair for OOPSLA 2000 and is currently Conference Chair for CHI 2007. She is author of Usability Engineering: Scenario-Based Development of Human-Computer Interaction (Morgan Kaufmann, 2002) as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and tutorials.

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Keynote 2:
Testing to Improve Requirements - Mission Impossible?
Dorothy Graham (Grove Consulting, UK)
Thursday, September 14, 9:00

Slides of the talk

Abstract: How is it possible that testing could help to make better requirements? If this sounds like "Mission Impossible" to you, you may be suffering under some myths or misconceptions about the relationship between requirements and testing. Requirements engineers, developers and testers all have a different "mindset" and this can result in mis-understandings about the relationship between them. Whether you use a traditional life cycle approach or a very iterative approach to development, both good requirements specifications and good testing practices are critical to success.
In this presentation we will outline the characteristics of a good relationship between requirements engineering and software testing. We will then look at a number of myths or misconceptions about this relationship, for example that testing comes after a system has been developed, that testers use requirements but not vice versa, that you can't test without requirements, that testers don't actually need requirements (a tester's misconception) and others.
We will conclude with some tips for how to achieve better requirements through a better relationship with testing. It's not mission impossible - it's mission critical. Good requirements engineering produces better tests, and good test analysis produces better requirements.

Biography: Dorothy Graham is the founder of Grove Consultants, which provides advice, training and inspiration in software testing, test automation and Inspection.
Dot is co-author of three books: "Software Inspection" (with Tom Gilb), "Software Test Automation" (with Mark Fewster) and "Software Testing Foundation (ISTQB)" (with Rex Black, Isabel Evans and Erik Van Veenendaal). Her article on requirements and testing was published in IEEE Software in 2002.
She was a founder member of the UK ISEB Software Testing Board, and is on the editorial board of the Better Software magazine. She is a recipient of the European Excellence Award in Software Testing.

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Keynote 3:
Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering, Part II
John Mylopoulos (University of Toronto, Canada and Università di Trento, Italy)
Friday, September 15, 14:00

Slides of the talk

Abstract: The last fifteen years have seen the rise of a new phase in software development which is concerned with the acquisition, modelling and analysis of stakeholder purposes ("goals") in order to derive functional and non-functional requirements. The history of ideas and research results for this new phase was reviewed in a RE'04 keynote presentation by Axel van Lamsweerde. We revisit the topic and sketch on-going research on a number of fronts. Specifically, we discuss an agent-oriented software development methodology -- called Tropos -- that is founded on the concepts of goal, actor as well as inter-actor dependencies. We also show how goal models that characterize a space of possible solutions for meeting stakeholder goals can be used as a basis for designing high variability software. In addition, we report on early work to extend database design techniques to support the generation of a database conceptual schema from stakeholder goals. The research reported is the result of collaborations with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto and Trento.

Biography: John Mylopoulos earned a PhD degree from Princeton 1970, the year he joined the faculty of the University of Toronto. His research interests include requirements engineering, conceptual modeling, data semantics and knowledge management. Mylopoulos is a co-recipient of the best-paper award of the 1994 International Conference on Software Engineering and an elected fellow of the American Association for AI (AAAI). He is currently serving as co-editor of the Requirements Engineering Journal and served as program chair of the International IEEE Symposium on Requirements Engineering (1997).

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