Requirements engineering is a field of growing interest to informatics theory and practice. On the one hand, efforts in formalization and integration of formal and informal representations move the frontier of design support environments towards the upstream phases. Thus, computer science offers the means to deal with requirements information as well as with the downstream phases of software specification, design, and implementation.

On the other hand, users demand "corporate ownership" of information technology. They will not use systems they do not trust, and they will not trust systems they do not understand. Requirements modeling, which provides an application perspective on software-intensive systems, offers a way for this understanding. But ways must be found to actually use the expressed requirements (functional and non—functionalones) in the process of developing, deploying, and using information systems, even down to the task of estimating consequences of information technology to workplace and society. This places strong demands on the structure and content of requirements information and on its integration in development environments.

Research groups throughout the world are attacking these issues with very different approaches, ranging from Formal Methods to Enterprise Modeling to User Interface Technology to Participative Design to Sedo—Technicaland Ethnographic Methodologies. It was the intention of this Dagstuhl seminar to bring leading representatives of these approaches together in an intensive discussion setting to achieve real progress in understanding their interrelationships and possible roles in future practice. Practitioners with a proven understanding for research were invited to provide a real-world perspective; individual researchers, including junior ones, brought in their ideas and got feedback for their further research The discussion was focused through a number of hypotheses concerning possible integration recently developed in collaborative basic research projects in which the organizers are involved.

This seminar brought together researchers from several disciplines and business practitioners to discuss needs and possibilities for better handling of requirements to complex organizational information systems. The discussion touched three dimensions of the requirements process:

• what requirements do we need to know about?
• what representations should be used?
• how can agreement between stakeholders be reached?

In addition, we discussed the business modeling context and three aspects ofthe RE process:

• modeling of methods and guidance
• modeling of CASE environments that guide, execute, and trace the process
• teaching of requirements engineering.

Creative Commons BY 3.0 DE