The OPENREQ project proposal was positively evaluated to receive 4.6 million Euro funding from the European Commission within the highly competitive Horizon 2020 EU research program.
OPENREQ focuses on applying intelligent recommendation and decision technologies for community-driven requirements engineering. The project will develop novel context-aware requirements engineering approaches and tools especially for large and distributed software projects, where the scale and complexity of alternatives outstrips the capability of stakeholders to survey them and to make individual or group decisions. For such projects, OPENREQ will semi-automatically identify, assess, and prioritize requirements from user’s, communities’, and stakeholders’ feedback, which is spread over different sources.
The project started in 2017 and will last for 3 years. Nine research and industry partners – including multinational companies and leading open source communities – from five European countries are involved. Prof. Dr. Walid Maalej is the coordinator and spokesperson of the project. About one third of the project funding will go to Hamburg.
During the year 2018, there were four plenary meetings of all partners discussing the project’s progress, chances, opportunities, risks as well as further plans and procedures. In addition to these meetings in Rome, Helsinki, Brussels and Graz, the partners organized several focus workshops. A recurrent subject of these meetings was the organization of the upcoming OpenCall. Within the OpenCall we will enable companies to apply for either developing components/services for OpenReq or for evaluating and integrating our services. These tasks are remunerated with up to 25 000 Euro.
One particular highlight was definitely the 1st Hamburg Requirements Engineering Symposium on our Campus with about 50 participants in May 2018. Several speakers from around the world discussed a wide range of topics regarding the importance and prominence of Requirements Engineering in Hamburg.
In September 2018, the first major test was successfully completed at the European Commission in Brussels. On site the results were presented to an international jury and evaluated positively. The academic work to date with more than 23 publications, as well as the integration and results of the industrial partners were particularly appreciated.
One of the major milestones in 2019 will be the transition to open source (https://github.com/OpenReqEU) according to the idea of free availability of academic content and research.
