TMIS 2014 - Complexity Systems Evolution: Requirements Engineering Perspective The ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (ACM TMIS)

Since its inception in the 1970s, much of the research in requirements engineering (RE) has focused on the development of formal notations and protocols to represent requirements and to analyze their properties, such as consistency, correctness, completeness, and validity. Some work has analyzed the impacts of these requirements on downstream development tasks (e.g., traceability), or managing and reconciling conflicts in the requirements process (e.g. negotiation). Much of requirements research has also assumed that the scope of RE is isolated to a specific project or even a specific stage of that project.
The motivation of this special issue is that many of these assumptions are now in suspect or related research delivers decreasing returns. The community has recognized for some time a need for a shift in RE focus which is also amplified by changes in computational paradigms and capabilities that draw upon platform strategies, web services, and virtualization of both application services and development platforms. These trends have significant implications for views of modularity and requirements evolution, complexity of RE tasks, and the economics and costs related to application and service use and development. The aim of the proposed special issue is to introduce, refine, validate models and theories around system complexity, evolution and requirements. In particular the special issue will focus on a series of interrelated issues such as:
? How to theorize and study complexity within RE tasks?
? New perspectives on RE complexity: biological systems, complexity evolutionary economics
? What theoretical perspectives can inform how and why complex requirements knowledge evolves as it is generated, validated, and distributed?
? How requirements, system evolution, and environmental change interact?
? How different types of knowledge interact to shape requirements and their evolution?
? What are the origins and flows of influence of requirements knowledge for complex evolving systems? How can non-linear influences be effectively managed in RE evolution?
? What is the effect of speed and scale in requirements processes?
? What is the role of goals and constraints and their complex interactions in RE?
? What are the effects of Governance on requirements complexity?