The requirements problem consists of transforming stakeholder requirements - however informal, ambiguous, conflicting, unattainable, imprecise and incomplete – into a consistent, complete and realizable specification through a systematic process. We propose a refinement calculus for requirements engineering (CaRE) for solving this problem, which is inspired by the typically dialectical nature of requirements activities. The calculus casts the requirement problem as an iterative argument between stakeholders and requirements engineers, where posited requirements are attacked for being ambiguous, incomplete, etc. and refined into new requirements that address the defect pointed out by the attack. Refinements are carried out by operators provided by CaRE that refine (e.g., strengthen, weaken, decompose) existing requirements to eliminate the defect under attack, to build a refinement graph. The semantics of refinement graphs is based on the notion of acceptable argument in Dung’s argumentation theory.

This is joint work with Yehia ElRakaiby, Alessio Ferrari and Alex Borgida.

We are living in the most exciting time in the history of mankind. The last century has seen unprecedented improvements in the quality of the human condition and technology is at the heart of this progress. Now we are experiencing an even bigger leap as we move towards a new level of digitalization and automation. Ranging from self-driving cars to factories without workers to societal infrastructure, every sensor and actuator is becoming connected and new applications that enable new opportunities are appearing daily. The fuel of this emerging connected, software-driven reality is software and the key challenge is to continuously deliver value to customers. The future of software business in this context is centered around four main developments: Speed, Data, Ecosystems and Empowerment. The focus on speed is concerned with the constantly increasing rate of deploying new software in the field. This continuous integration and deployment is no longer only the purview of internet companies but is also increasingly deployed in embedded systems. Second, data is concerned with the vast amounts of information collected from systems deployed in the field and the behavior of the users of these systems. Software businesses need to significantly improve their ability to exploit the value present in that data. Third, ecosystems are concerned with the transition in many companies from doing everything in-house to strategic use of innovation partners and partners providing commodity functionality. Finally, empowerment is concerned with addressing the challenges that traditional hierarchical forms of organization and the quest for alternative forms of organizing work based on empowerment and autonomy. The keynote addresses these four main developments, provides numerous examples from the Nordic and international industry and discusses the role of continuous integration, continuous deployment and devops in the transition from efficiency of software to effectiveness. It summarizes the next steps that industry and academia need to engage in to remain competitive.

The efficient management and retrieval of information has been investigated since the early days of Vannevar Bush's seminal article 'As We May Think' introducing the Memex. However, nowadays information is fragmented across different media types, devices as well as digital and physical environments and we are often struggling to find information. In this keynote I will discuss three main issues to be addressed when developing solutions for managing information in these co-called cross-media information spaces. We first have a look at an extensible cross-media linking solution based on the RSL (resource-selector-link) hypermedia metamodel where information can be integrated across applications, devices as well as digital and physical information environments. I will then outline some of the limitations of existing digital document formats which are often just a simulation of paper documents and their affordances on desktop computers, and discuss more flexible document representations for cross-media information spaces. Further, new forms of human-information interaction and cross-media user interfaces, including some recent work on dynamic data physicalisation, are introduced. Various research artefacts such as the EdFest interactive paper prototype, the PimVis solution for personal cross-media information management or the MindXpres platform for next generation presentation solutions will be used to illustrate different aspects of the presented data-centric approach for cross-media information spaces and architectures. Last but not least, I will provide an outlook on how the embedding of the presented concepts at the level of an operating system might ultimately lead to new possibilities for cross-media information management and innovative forms of human-information interaction.