Message from the REFS 2008 Workshop Organizers

Welcome to REFS 2008, the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Requirements Engineering For Services. On behalf of the programme committee, we welcome you to Turku, Finland. The REFS 2008 workshop serve as a highly interactive forum for in-depth discussion of all issues related to requirements engineering for services following the REFS 2007 workshop in Beijing, China. Service orientation is rapidly emerging as the leading network computing paradigm. A common feature of service orientation across all levels is the need to understand and characterize what the customer wants, including socio-technical constraints, and to design services that can meet those requirements effectively. In recent years, requirements engineering (RE) has emerged as a critical area in software and systems engineering, as many systems fail due to poorly understood, ill-defined, or ill-conceived requirements. Much of the same concepts and techniques could potentially be applied to services, with the benefit of systematic methods and scientific inquiry. However, service orientation introduces many new challenges. Will existing requirements engineering methods and techniques be suitable for a service oriented environment? What adaptations, extensions, or re-conceptualizations will be needed? How can requirements engineering contribute to a new discipline of services science, management, and engineering? Will service orientation lead to a rethinking of the field of requirements engineering? These are some of the key questions explored at this workshop. This year the workshop received very good response and submissions from active researchers all over the world. All papers were carefully reviewed by at least three program committee members, and detailed constructive feedback was provided to the authors. We are pleased to announce that for REFSS 2008, we have an excellent and exciting program including the keynote giving profound insight in service-oriented computing, paper presentation sessions intertwined with a discussion panel. The most important resource is the gathering of the many enthusiastic participants, who are expected to take the opportunity to share their knowledge in intensive informal discussion to develop new ideas, new strategies and new productive networks. The workshop is the result of many people’s hard work. These include the research and industrial development that prepared the concepts and evidence that is brought to the meeting. It includes the hard work of the Programme Committee members and chairs, and the invaluable coordination and support from COMPSAC organizers, in particular, the COMPSAC steering committee Carl Chang, Atilla Elci, web chair Hua Ming, proceedings chair Ville Leppanen and the conference local chair Tiberu Seceleanu. Accepted papers are published by IEEE Computer Society Conference Publishing Service in the workshop proceedings of the 32nd IEEE Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 2008), which are captured in the online IEEE Digital Library, and professionally indexed through INSPEC and EI Index. Best papers are recommended for publishing on international journals. We hope you all find the workshop productive and memorable.