Guest Editors' Introduction: RE 02-A Major Step toward a Mature Requirements Engineering Community

tasks (such as elicitation, validation, negotiation, specification, and documentation) have emerged and continuously been improved based on industrial feedback. Since the early 1990s, RE has increasingly been recognized as a discipline of its own. In 1993, the first IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE) took place. This biannual meeting mainly provided a forum for exchanging research results and ideas. In 1994, the first biannual International Conference on Requirements Engineering (ICRE), designated as the field’s technology transfer conference, occurred. Several workshop series, working groups, research networks, journals, and other national and international conferences emerged around the same time. In 2002, the practice-oriented conference series and the research-oriented symposium series merged—a major milestone toward a mature RE community. The resulting annual IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) is now the field’s flagship conference. It provides an excellent forum for establishing relationships and collaborations between industry and research and for discussing and exchanging industrial experiences, problem statements, research results, visions, and, of course, innovations. The first merged conference, RE 02, took place in September 2002 in Essen, Germany. RE 02 demonstrated the field’s vitality. From over 250 submissions, the program committee selected 27 research papers, 22 experience papers, and 34 industrial talks. Over 300 participants from public and private organizations, labs, and universities (half from industry, half from the research community) experienced strong convergence toward an integrated RE community. The challenges raised and the experiences reported on resulted in numerous fruitful and stimulating discussions within and outside the sessions. Conference participants identified several emerging themes as well as significant improvements of established techniques and tools, including the following: Continuous requirements management. Traditionally, RE was seen as an early phase in the system development process. As proposed in the mid 1990s, shorter time to market, technology changes, and frequently changing environments force a shift in this traditional view. So, RE should be understood as a continuous activity that manages requirements evolution throughout the system life cycle and between system boundaries.2 Several presentations tackled issues guest editors’ introduction