Welcome from the Organizers FormReq 2021 (IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops)
Résumé
While the importance of requirements formalization has often been highlighted, the way to support this activity in industrial context has not been sufficiently addressed in current research. Since a major determinant of the quality of software systems is the quality of their requirements, these must be both understandable and precise. Natural language, the most commonly used for writing requirements, helps understandability, but lacks precision. To achieve precision, researchers have for many years advocated the use of formal approaches to writing requirements. Many requirements methods and notations are available as a result of these efforts and they vary considerably in their style, scope and applicability. Despite of this, industrial application is still limited. The workshop aims at raising fundamental questions, including how remote the current state of the technology is from potential widespread industrial usage of formal methods. The objective is also to focus on existing methods that do have industrial application and identify the reason of their success. This workshop will bring together industrial practitioners as well as researchers to discuss the good practices, the remaining challenges, of using formal approaches to express and manage requirements. The keynote will illustrate one of these challenges. Presented by Panagiotis Katsaros of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, it tackles the problem of formalisation and analysis of natural language system requirements. The selected papers present new developments on two traditional, but always pending, challenges, namely to develop relevant verification tools for requirements specification and to bridge the gap between customer requirements and formal analysis.