OpenReq Open Call

Accepted proposals:

  • Alter Way, Ltd (France)
  • ApuliaSoft, Srl (Italy)
  • Fundación Ibercivis, non-profit (Spain)
  • SelectionArts Intelligent Decision Technologies, GmbH (Austria)
  • QE LaB Business Service, GmbH (Austria)
  • SEnerCon, GmbH (Germany)

The accepted proposals are subject to contract signing with HITeC e.V. which will take place on February, 8th 2019, at the earliest.

 

 

The OpenReq project

To fund and assist eligible entities to profit from the research and innovation results of OpenReq, interested parties can submit their proposal at the ELVIS platform by 7 December 2018, 17:00 Brussels time.

For the PDF version of the Open Call, see here.

OpenReq (Intelligent Recommendation & Decision Technologies for Community-Driven Requirements Engineering) is a European research and innovation project funded under the Horizon 2020 programme. OpenReq addresses the challenging objective of creating a platform of services to semi-automatically support collaborative decision-making in large software projects. The focus is on Requirements Engineering-related decisions, such as requirement quality improvement, release planning, and requirements reuse.

OpenReq is an integrated platform that continuously monitors, analyses, and aggregates project and product information to:

  • Support stakeholders in collaboratively developing, screening, analyzing, and assessing relevant requirements throughout a project.
  • Understand users by systematically analysing their implicit and explicit feedback. Implicit feedback includes software usage data and can, for example, help understand how and how often particular features are used to prioritise users’ requests. Explicit feedback, gathered through social media channels, can reveal issues, emergent needs, and new requirements.
  • Automatically extract dependencies between requirements — e.g., inconsistencies and conflicts, from the requirements text and metadata.
  • Filter requirements relevant to a product release — e.g., based on dependencies, stakeholders preferences (including users), time constraints, and budget limitations.
  • Provide recommendations to developers, analysts, and other stakeholders during requirements-related tasks — e.g., improve the quality of the requirements text.
  • Help reach consensus among stakeholders regarding requirements to be integrated into a certain product release using group recommendation approaches.
  • Support the reuse of requirements in similar projects — e.g., in the same business domain.

For a list of OpenReq features, see here.

In particular, OpenReq focuses on the following industrial scenarios (i.e., OpenReq trials):

  • Intelligent requirement engineering and reuse for railway systems.
  • Complex dependencies and knowledge management in OSS communities.
  • Requirements intelligence and decision support for a telecom operator.

The OpenReq consortium provides platform interfaces consisting of a set of JSON APIs for the integration of OpenReq services. Technical documentation to learn the capabilities of OpenReq API platform is available here.

Please note that this is an on-going research project and the technical maturity of certain services and their documentation can be limited.

 

Goal of the call

In this Open Call, we seek proposals from eligible parties who want to integrate, extend, and evaluate OpenReq technologies for tools, processes, and use cases of their interest.

The call participants are expected to:

  • Perform technical work (including implementation and deployment, e.g., of connectors).
  • Conduct evaluation(s) in real-world settings (i.e., with real-world data and participants).
  • Contribute to the dissemination and exploitation activities of the OpenReq project (e.g., blogging or attending events).

The selected participants will be invited to present their results during one of the OpenReq meetings hosted by the consortium in 2019 (date, location, and participation conditions will be communicated per time). The selected participants will give a presentation/demo of approximately 20 minutes.

 

Course of the Open Call and timeline

  • 29 October 2018: Call opens
  • 7  December 2018: Proposal submission deadline (17:00 Brussels time)
  • Until 7 December 2018, all interested entities may submit their applications.
  • Mid-January 2019: Selection and contract signing and announcement of winners
  • After the deadline for the submission of the proposals has expired, the proposals will be selected/evaluated according to the determined provisions/criteria (see below).
  • Subsequently, the contracts would be signed by the parties.
  • The winners will then be publicly announced.
  • 31 July 2019: End of Open Call period. Delivery and presentation of the results.

 

Submission of the proposals

We require the participants to submit their proposals using the ELVIS platform available here.

We require the participants to prepare their proposals according to the OpenReq Open call submission template called “Open Call Proposal Template” also available on the above-mentioned platform.

The only document to be submitted by interested parties/entities is their proposal (“Open Call Proposal Template”).

We require the participants to prepare their proposal in English. Proposals written in other languages will be rejected without revision.

The language of the procedure is English.

 

Eligibility Criteria

The call is addressed to EU legal entities (i.e., registered with a VAT number), including:

  • European SMEs following the definition in the Commission Recommendation 2003/361/EC.
  • Entrepreneurs from software engineering, software technology, analytics & intelligence, market research industries as well as companies that use (or intend to use) these technologies intensively as a business enabler.
  • Open source evangelists and key players OSS communities.
  • Individuals, such as experienced developers encountering the challenges addressed by OpenReq.

 

Performance specification

We call for proposals covering (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Smoothly integrate relevant OpenReq features into popular — preferably open source — tools, including issue trackers (e.g., Bugzilla, Jira, GitHub Issues), requirements management tools, release planning tools, communication tools, and office tools.
  • Collect usage and context data from the applicant’s apps and tools, or from popular ones, using a framework developed for this specific purpose.
  • Integrate OpenReq services into intelligent conversational interfaces (e.g., chatbot, Siri, Alexa.) for quick and easy natural language querying—e.g., to support stakeholder meetings.
  • Integrate popular platforms, such as StackOverflow, as a data source for the OpenReq services. StackOverflow is one of the primary resources for developers to discuss issues, complain about functionalities, exchange needs, and nice-to-haves.
  • Integrate requirements quality improvement approaches, such as reducing the ambiguity of requirements text, into popular word processors via ad-hoc plugins.
  • Integrate OpenReq user participation approach, based on Liquid Democracy, in an app. For example, give users the possibility to participate in the prioritization of requirements by acquiring tokens from a smart contract set up by a group of stakeholders.

 

Expected Results

After the evaluation process, the selected participants will perform their work.

During this period, the OpenReq consortium requires compliance with an intermediate control point in agreement with the proposal submitted by the selected participant. Additional milestones can be suggested and implemented by the participant.

At the end of the Open Call project period, the selected participants will deliver the following:

  • Running software binary (and source code where applicable).
  • User documentation, including, how to run the software and how to use its functionalities (Swagger format documentation is also expected in case API are produced).
  • Dataset used for the implementation and evaluation of the solution (if applicable).
  • Project report (~10 pages) containing a short description of the development activities, results of the feedback and evaluation activities, description and results of the dissemination activities. Note that possible deviations from the original proposal should also be reported.
  • A brief report of cost claim.

 

Evaluation process

The evaluation process will take place in two steps: Screening and Experts Panel.

Step1: Screening

The consortium will first check that proposals are received from entities meet the Eligibility Criteria named above.

The consortium will only consider proposals written in English and submitted before the deadline (7 December, 17:00 Brussels time) via the ELVIS platform.

Step2: Experts Panel

The panel is composed of representatives of the companies involved in the OpenReq trials, members of the OpenReq Advisory Board, and the project coordinator.

The selected experts will sign a declaration of confidentiality and conflict of interest.

Each proposal will be evaluated by three members of the panel, one HITeC representative and two others, using the evaluation form available here.

The evaluation criteria carry different weights and are evaluated on a 5-point scale (1 – Does not meet expectation, 5 – Goes beyond expectations) for a total of 20 points.

The evaluation criteria are:

  • Feasibility (10 points max – 5 points, weight 2)
    • Alignment with OpenReq objectives
    • Technical soundness of proposed solution and complementarity with OpenReq services
    • Milestone, Budget, and Resources
  • Evaluation and Feedback (5 points max)
    • Evaluation of the developed tools, data sources, and approaches
    • Quality and quantity of evaluation data
    • Feedback about OpenReq existing features to the consortium
    • Commitment and willingness to collaborate with the consortium partners
  • Impact (5 points max)
    • Business capacity and market-readiness
    • Users’ reach
    • Contribution to communication, exploitation and dissemination actions

The average score of the three members of the panel will be calculated. Proposals above the threshold of 12 (out of 20 total) points will then be discussed by the entire panel, which will then meet to make a final funding decision. In case of a tie, proposals requesting less funding will be preferred (in case of further ties the selection will be based on majority votes).

Notifications on funding decisions, including rejections, will be sent out at the beginning of January 2019. Please note that the panel review will not be included with the funding decisions. After the evaluation, representatives of the selected proposals will be invited to sign a Subcontracting Agreement (see also the platform) with HITeC e.V. based in Hamburg, Germany.

After the Subcontracting Agreement is signed, the list of selected proposals will be published on the OpenReq website and other appropriate channels.

 

Funding conditions

The total budget for this Open Call is 180.000 €, and it will be used to subcontract entities from at least three different EU countries. We expect proposals requesting up to 30.000 €; the panel will not consider proposals requesting funding over this limit. The number of funded projects will vary depending on the complexity, relevance and requested budget of the proposals. The panel will make recommendations on the amount of investment; therefore, it may not exactly match the requested funding.

The payment will follow a staged schedule according to the subcontracting agreement. Regarding the eligible costs, participation as a third party in an H2020 project will cover all the incurred costs.

Note that the selected applicants may be audited by the EU Commission in accordance with the Art. 13 of the H2020 Grant Agreement, which states the following criteria:

(i) They must be incurred in the Open Call period, except for costs relating to the submission of the technical report and financial statement.

(ii) They must be identifiable and verifiable, in particular, recorded in the selected applicant’s accounts in accordance with the accounting standards applicable in the country where the selected applicant is established and with the selected applicant’s usual cost accounting practices.

(iii) They must comply with the applicable German national law on taxes, labor, and social security.

(iv) They must be reasonable, justified, and must comply with the principle of sound financial management, in particular regarding economy and efficiency.

All interested parties are kindly asked to submit their proposals based on the available Open Call documents, including the contract. Please also note that signed contracts do not have to be submitted as part of the bidder’s proposal.  The proposals will be evaluated according to the determined criteria after the deadline for the submission of the proposals has expired. Subsequently, the contracts would be signed by the parties. The winning bidders will be given sufficient time to review the filled out contract, based on the winning proposal, and all annexes in the time between the end of the evaluation and the signing of the contracts. However, there will be no contract negotiation.

 

Copyright and confidentiality

The applicants retain the intellectual property rights (IPR) of their work. On the finished product and any related website or materials, the applicants must use the “Made with OpenReq” logo.

The OpenReq consortium is developing open source software using a business-friendly license (EPL) so that proprietary platforms, which are integrated with OpenReq, can remain closed.

Access to the code base and the licensing of the source code developed by the call participants will follow the description in the section “Impact” of the proposal.

 

Compensation

The interested entity shall not be entitled to compensation for the costs incurred in preparing the proposal.

 

Further inquiries

For further inquiries, please contact us at info@openreq.eu

We expect to process your inquiries within five working days.

The last day to submit your inquiry is November 30, 2018.

Please, check our privacy policy to know how this data is handled.