Requirements Engineering includes various activities aimed at discovering, analyzing, validating, evolving, and managing software and systems requirements. Many of these activities are human facing, effort intensive, and sometimes error prone. They could benefit greatly from cutting edge advances in automation. However, the software engineering community has primarily focused on automating other aspects of the development process such as testing, code analytics, and mining software respositories. As a result, advances in software analytics have had superficial impact upon advancing the state of art and practice in the field of requirements engineering. Two primary inhibitors are the lack of publicly available datasets and poorly publicized industry-relevant open requirements analytic challenges. To empower the Automated Software Engineering community to tackle open Requirements Engineering challenges, the talk will describe the rapidly evolving landscape of requirements engineering, clearly articulate open challenges, draw upon examples from an ongoing, agile, safety-critical project in the domain of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, and introduce Dronology as a new community dataset.

Dr. Jane Cleland-Huang is Full Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Prior to her involvement in academia, Dr. Cleland-Huang worked in industry as a developer. She is currently director of the Software and Requirements Engineering Research Lab and serves as North American Director of the Center of Excellence for Software Traceability. She has served as PI on grants worth over $7 Million. Dr. Cleland-Huang currently serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and serves on the Editorial Board of Springer-Verlag's Requirements Engineering Journal. She is on the Steering Committee of the International Requirements Engineering Conference, has served as Program Chair for RE'2010 held in Sydney, Australia and was Program co-Chair of the SIGSOFT Conference on 2016 Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE). Dr. Cleland-Huang currently teaches undergraduate level courses in Software Engineering. Contact her at (JaneClelandHuang at nd dot edu.)

The development of a software system requires the orchestration of many different people using many different tools. Despite the need for a developer who is performing a task to understand the context in which that task is undertaken, the tools we imagine, build and provide to support software developers are typically isolated. Instead of the tools helping a developer work within the appropriate context, it is the developer who must bring the context to the tools.
In this talk, I will argue that the lack of context in the software engineering tools we build limits the effectiveness of developers and of our software development practices.

Gail C. Murphy is a Professor of Computer Science and Vice-President Research and Innovation at the University of British Columbia. She is also a co-founder at Tasktop Technologies inc. Her research interests are in improving the productivity of software developers and knowledge workers by giving them tools to identify, manage and coordinate the information that really matters for their work. She is a Fellow of the ACM and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She is the recipient of the 2018 IEEE Computer Society Harlan D. Mills award and a previous recipient of an NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Award and the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize.

Software engineering research rarely impacts practitioners in the field. A desire to facilitate transfer alone is not sufficient to bridge the gap between research and practice. Fields from medicine to education have acknowledged a similar challenge over the past 25 years. An empirical approach to the translation of research into evidence-based practice has emerged from the resulting discussion. Implementation science has fundamentally changed the way that biomedical research is conducted, and has revolutionized the daily practice of doctors, social workers, epidemiologists, early childhood educators, and more. In this talk we will explore the methods, frameworks, and practices of implementation science and their application to novel disciplines, including software engineering research. We will close by proposing some directions for future software engineering research to facilitate transfer.

Lauren Herckis is an anthropologist at Carnegie Mellon University with appointments in the Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She is also affiliated with Carnegie Mellon’s Center for the Future of Work and Simon Initiative. She specializes in organizational and contextual barriers and affordances to the adoption of innovative tools and practices in higher education. Herckis applies anthropological methods and theory to analyze human engagement with the material world in my field research, and is interested in learning science, factionalism, the pedagogical training of future faculty, the politics of praxis in fieldwork, identity maintenance, and political economy in urban growth. Her research in Latin America interrogates assumptions about cultural heterogeneity in the context of long-term urban growth, and highlights the ways that social networks dynamically impact technical choices and the development of informal economies. Her current projects explore the intersection of campus culture, technological change, and effective teaching at the college level. Her research informs policymaking, shapes the development of learning technologies, and illuminates aspects of organizational culture and policy which affect teaching practice.
Dr. Herckis has spent her career working in quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods research design and execution, in public, private, and non-profit contexts, and across a variety of disciplinary domains. A former Fulbright fellow, Dr. Herckis worked with the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, the Center for Health Equity Research and Promotion at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Instructional Development and Distance Education before joining Carnegie Mellon's Simon Initiative.