The purpose of requirements engineering is to ensure that the final product, or product family, fulfils customers and user needs. Requirements Engineering helps stakeholders to elicit their expectancies with respect to systems, to prioritize such expectancies and, ultimately, to reach a common ground with other stakeholders with conflicting requirements. Furthermore, it helps stakeholders from different backgrounds to communicate among them, and with the systems developers. Quality is often considered something that must be in conformance to system requirements. However, the requirements keep changing, making difficult to guarantee business alignment. Thus, quality is a moving target! Requirement engineers have also other challenges related to keeping up with different methodologies, maintaining the traceability of requirements, applying reuse, guarantying recognizable, clear, consistent, complete, correct, and testable requirements. Besides that, quality is difficult to achieve in a project without first developing quality requirements; it is how well the quality requirements are engineered and implemented that determines the success or failure of complex and mission-critical systems.

The Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering Thematic Track 2012 has at its final program papers that cover several important topics in the area: MDD transformations, approaches to reduce the gap and inconsistency between models and stakeholders, reuse in requirement engineering, compliance analysis based on a maturity model of business process-based requirements engineering approaches, the topics requirements traceability and non-functional requirements.

The work by Vasconcelos from UFPE (Brazil), together with his colleagues from Norway (SRLab) and Spain (UPV), entitled “Towards CMMI-Compliant Business Process-Driven Requirements Engineering” proposes a compliance analysis of business process-based requirements engineering approaches, based on a maturity model.

Two papers address model-driven development (MDD) theme. The first one, by Buarque et al., entitled “A MDD Process that Transforms i* Requirements Models in OO-Method Models Sensitive to Non-Functional Requirements” also comes from UFPE (Brazil). The second paper entitled “Model-Driven Development for Requirements Engineering: The Case of Goal-Oriented Approaches”, by Monteiro and his colleagues from UNL (Portugal), proposes the definition and implementation of goal model transformations between i* and KAOS.

From the Faculty of Organizational Science (Belgrade, Serbia) together with the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal) comes the paper entitled “Use Case Specification at Different Levels of Abstraction”. It addresses an approach to help using cases specification to be more understandable for the majority of participants in the software development. Two Brazilian universities (UPE and UFPE) contribute with the paper “A Framework to Diminish the Gap between the Business Specialist and the Software Designer”. This paper presents an approach to requirements modeling, fostering greater consistency between the artifacts of the scenarios and the conceptual model.

From two universities on north of Portugal (IPVC and UMinho) comes the paper “From Business Process Modeling to Data Model: A systematic approach”, a work by Cruz and Machado. The aim of this paper is to study BPMN 2.0 focusing on the usage and persistence of data, and present an approach for obtaining an early data model from the business process modeling, which may then be used as a starting data model in the software development process. Finally, the paper by Alves and her colleagues, involving two Brazilian Universities (UFPE and UPE), entitled “Improving Requirements Quality in Digital Libraries” describes an approach to give support for the requirements definition in the Digital Library Domain based on the experience of three previously developed platforms.

Three work in progress where accepted in this Thematic Track (Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering). The first one, involving authors from a Brazilian university (Universidade de São Paulo) considers the development of WEB systems. The second one entitled “Formally Specifying Requirements with RSL-IL” comes from IST (Lisbon, Portugal). The authors introduce RSL-IL, a domain-specific language that can be used to formally specify system requirements; the formal semantics of RSL-IL constructs enable further computations on the representation of requirements, such as the automatic verification and generation of complementary views that support stakeholders during requirements validation. The third work is the product of the collaboration between two universities from northeast Brazil (UPE and UFRPE) entitled “Towards a Traceability Visualization Tool”, which includes a literature review on traceability visualization and also requirements to a traceability visualization tool.

In summary, the track on Quality ICT Requirements Engineering accepted 7 papers and 3 works in progress covering different topics in Requirements Engineering. We are grateful to all those who submitted papers to this event and also the revising board who helped to improve the quality of the accepted papers and their selection on this track.