Special Issue Call for Papers

MOTIVATION

Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family but others are unique to individual products.

Requirements Engineering (RE) processes and techniques are used to identify and characterize product line requirements and potential member products based upon their commonality and variability. In addition, they also involve activities such as product line requirements modeling, specification, verification and management. Due to the complexity and extensive nature of product line development, requirements engineering is much more important for software product line practice than for single product development.

The major risk associated with RE in general is the failure to capture the right requirements over the life of the product line. The aim of this special issue is to attract the attention of professionals from academia and industry about the importance of well-defined and systematic approaches for requirements engineering in product line development. Experiences from practitioners, empirical evidence about current practices, successful deployment of novel approaches, and current obstacles and solutions will also be addressed.


ABOUT THE ISSUE

The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Requirements elicitation, analysis, documentation, validation and verification for a SPL
- Techniques or methods tailored for requirements engineering in a SPL
- Quality requirements and variability management in a SPL
- Relating product line requirements to business goals, architecture and testing
- Value-driven requirements engineering for a SPL
- Agile requirements engineering for a SPL
- Evolution of SPL requirements
- Security requirements in product line engineering
- Non-functional requirements and their dependence on application domain
- Quality assessment of requirements models for a SPL
- Development environments and tools for managing requirements in a SPL
- Adoption of RE methods and techniques in product line engineering
- Model-driven approaches for product line requirements engineering
- Domain-specific problems, experiences and solutions in SPL development
- Empirical studies in the area of SPL requirements engineering
- Experience reports including problems or success in the process of RE for a SPL


SUBMISSION FORMAT AND GUIDELINES

Papers will be evaluated based on their originality, presentation, relevance and contribution, as well as their overall quality and suitability for the special issue.

The submitted papers must be written in a good English. Theoretical and practical articles are welcome. However, theoretical articles must explicitly address some empirical evidence, practical demonstration, or substantive discussion of the practical application of the proposed idea for the design of complex systems.

Authors should format their articles according to the instructions described at:
http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/journal/766 (Instructions for authors)

All the articles should be submitted via the online Springer reviewing system available at:
http://www.editorialmanager.com/REJ/

For more information, please contact the guest editors.


IMPORTANT DATES

Submission deadline: January 31, 2013
Notification: March 31, 2013


GUEST EDITORS

Emilio Insfran, Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain (einsfran@dsic.upv.es)

Gary Chastek, SEI-Software Engineering Institute. Carnegie-Mellon University, USA (gjc@sei.cmu.edu)

Patrick Donohoe, SEI-Software Engineering Institute. Carnegie-Mellon University, USA (pd@sei.cmu.edu)

Julio C. Leite, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (julio@inf.puc-rio.br)