18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) 2010

Software systems in today’s multi-faceted world are as diverse as the people who use them. While some are built according to rigorous government regulations, others must be delivered quickly to meet time-to-market deadlines or must be responsive to changing business needs. From a requirements engineering perspective there is certainly no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution.

Diversity is also prevalent across software development teams where end-users, developers, and other stakeholders often come from entirely different cultural, linguistic, religious, and educational backgrounds. Only by understanding and embracing this diversity can we communicate effectively across these boundaries and collaboratively build software systems that meet stakeholders’ needs, wants, and desires. As the Requirements Engineering research and practice community, we therefore need to develop innovative and useful techniques for eliciting, analysing, specifying, and managing requirements effectively across diverse project teams for a broad spectrum of projects.