1 The Brave New World of Information Systems and Business Software Requirements: Four Key Principles Matthias Jarke, RWTH Aachen University Pericles Loucopoulos, University of Loughborough Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto William Robinson, Georgia State University Abstract Despite undoubted successes in the last decades, requirements engineering needs a better alignment between research and its grounding in practical needs by refocusing its research agenda. We explore seven requirements issues that currently influence the discovery and management of design requirements. The exploration is based on a field study and expert discussions that took place during a workshop held in June 2007 and funded by the US National Science Foundation’s Science of Design Program. Based on these issues we propose four key design principles that will shape future requirements processes: (1) intertwining of requirements with implementation and organizational contexts, (2) dynamic evolution of requirements, (3) architectures as a critical stabilizing force in requirements engineering processes, and (4) new ways to mitigate design complexity. Several new research challenges are identified based on the review and analysis of workshop documents and discussion. 1 I ntroduction Requirements engineering research gathered momentum during the past 15 years. Much of this research has focused on artifacts that help capture, share, analyze, negotiate, and prioritize requirements, as evidenced by the volume and impact of papers published in the Requirements Engineering Journal and in the IEEE Requirements Engineering conference series, as well as other leading journals including IEEE Software, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, and Communications of the ACM. The genesis for much of this research was motivated by practitioners who noticed the need for systematic requirements engineering in large software projects of the 1970’s. It may therefore not be surprising that much of the early RE research results have now found their way into practice. Yet, the environment in which software systems engineering and thus also requirements engineering is carried out has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. This is at least partly due to increases in computing speed, lowering of computing cost, and advances in functionality which have made software a ubiquitous component in every walk of life. These advances have gradually shifted the field from the engineering of individual systems towards the generation of IT-supported ecosystems. This change has created a strong need to re-align old practices to meet new challenges and re- focus RE research. For example, a recent empirical study of RE practices [1] revealed several key challenges of which we highlight only three here. 1. There is practically no green-field software development; requirements engineering acts more like the ancient Roman god of gates—Janus, with one face, looking at new challenges and opportunities and another face gazing at existing (technological, organizational, social and political) environments. 2. The scaling towards IT supported ecosystems results in enormously complex and non- linear dynamic dependencies between system components and their natural, technical and social environment—“green IT” being just one of the latest buzzword.