JIT RE 2015 - 1st Workshop on Just-In-Time RE

Requirements engineering (RE) in agile and open source settings is quite different than RE in more conventional development settings. In particular, these requirements tend to be more ad-hoc and ‘just-in-time’, developed as needed rather than upfront. Requirements might be called user stories, features, or even tasks. Just in time as a production strategy can be traced to Toyota and other Japanese firms in the 1950s. The strategy referred to meeting customer demand at the right time and in the exact amount, where customer could be the final purchaser or another process further along the production line. Ohno underpinned just in time with 3 principles of economic growth: build only what is needed, eliminate anything which does not add value, and stop if something goes wrong. The just-in-time philosophy was also applied to software engineering, serving as a basic tenet of the lean software practices and the agile community. Research on just-in-time requirements has recently emerged, which not only challenges classical RE’s assumptions but also illuminates potentially transformative ideas to improve RE practice especially in distributed and decentralized settings. This workshop will solicit mature and ongoing research in this area, engage a keynote speaker to stimulate discussion, and aim for a concrete list of open problems for the wider community.
Neil Ernst, Software Engineering Institute/Carnegie Mellon University, USA
Nan Niu, University of Cincinnati, USA