The Requirements Engineering Body of Knowledge (REBoK) Birgit Penzenstadler Donald Bren School of Informatics University of California, Irvine, U.S. bpenzens@uci.edu Daniel M´ endez Fern´ andez Software & Systems Engineering Technische Universit¨ at M¨ unchen mendezfe@in.tum.de Debra Richardson Donald Bren School of Informatics University of California, Irvine, U.S. djr@uci.edu David Callele Department of Computer Science University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada dcallele@uci.edu Krzysztof Wnuk Dept. of Computer Science Lund University, Sweden Krzysztof.Wnuk@cs.lth.se Abstract—A body of knowledge is a term used to represent the complete set of concepts, terms and activities that make up a professional domain. It encompasses the core teachings, skills and research in a field or industry. So far, the discipline of RE is lacking an official Requirements Engineering Body of Knowledge (REBoK). This working session brings together researchers and practi- tioners to elaborate the goals, requirements and constraints for a REBoK that shall serve as commonly agreed basis for developing a draft over the following months. Index Terms—Requirements Engineering; Body of Knowledge; REBoK; RE Interactive; Requirements Engineering Education; I. MOTIVATION As first-year PhD student we would have loved to have a Body of Knowledge (BoK) to get a better overview of the field of Requirements Engineering. As postdocs we would like to have a BoK to quickly review potential related works and crosscutting topics. As lecturers we would like to have a BoK to refer our students to and send them exploring. As practitioners we would like a BoK to be able to get a quick start into a new (sub-)topic that we might need for our work but are not yet an expert in. Why would you want to have a REBoK? The purpose of this working session is to discuss what a common vision for a requirements engineering body of knowledge should be and what our major requirements for such a body of knowledge are. This provides the basis for future efforts to establish such a body of knowledge. Such a body of knowledge could facilitate research, practice, and education alike. We do not expect BoKs to be as contentious a topic as certification, but we might have some lively discussion on their role and value as we are sure there are different opinions on these in the RE community. Therefore, it is important to base any work on a BoK on an agreed set of requirements and this session shall be the first step. Contribution: This working session brings together re- searchers and practitioners to elaborate objectives, require- ments and constraints for a REBoK to serve as commonly agreed basis for developing a draft over the upcoming months. II. PREVIOUS WORK There are five major sources of information in form of bodies of knowledge and other previous works that will provide input for an official REBoK. The most well known body of knowledge is the Software Engineering Body Of Knowledge (SWEBOK) that also in- cludes a section on requirements engineering [4]. One of the authors of the requirements engineering section, Pete Sawyer, also provides an input vision for the REBoK in the working session according to his statement in Sec. III. The Japanese REBoK [7], [2] by has been developed in 2008/09 by Mikio Aoyama et al. for the Japan Information Technology Services Association, which was presented and discussed at the Intl. Conf. on Requirements Engineering in 2010 [1]. The Japanese REBoK has not been translated to English, but it serves as a central input for our common effort as Mikio Aoyama also provides an input vision for the REBoK session, see Sec. III. The Business Analysis Body of Knowledge [5] is the other important body of knowledge that serves as input for the REBoK. Business Analysis and Requirements Engineering overlap and have to go hand-in-hand, so the RE community can benefit from their practices as well as their guide to a BoK. The syllabus for the IREB Certified Professional for Re- quirements Engineering [6] encompasses the contents that have to be mastered for a certification by IREB. Martin Glinz, who authored the IREB Glossary of RE Terminology presents another input vision for the REBoK session, see Sec. III. Finally, the Requirements Bibliography [3] by Al Davis provides a bibliography of 6000 requirements-related papers and books. Although the bibliography is no longer maintained and updated, it may still serve as a source of information. With this knowledge base of previous work, the RE com- munity is now well prepared to define an official body of knowledge for their different educational purposes. 978-1-4673-5765-4/13 c  2013 IEEE RE 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Special Sessions Accepted for publication by IEEE. c  2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. 377