What is the goal of research questions in a paper? I'm a PhD student about to begin writing my first research paper for a software engineering conference. My research is about an approach to measure the performance of software systems. I will evaluate and compare this approach to other state of the art approaches that measure performance to compare the performance of the approach itself and the accuracy. 

First, I wanted to know what the goal of research questions are in research papers. Once that is clarified, I believe I would be able to decide if my paper should include research questions.
I think it is important to understand, especially as a new author of research articles, that unless otherwise specified, the term "research question" does not necessarily need to be a sentence or sentences that end in a question mark and actually ask a specific question. On the contrary, a research question is most often not a question at all, but rather an explanation of why the work you are describing is important and how it will advance your field forward.

For example - and this is particularly true within the scientific community: the entire "Introduction" section of a research article acts as the research question. In other words, this section typically gives a background of the research area, explains what work has already been done to advance this field, focuses on what still has yet to be done, and then concludes with what parts of what has yet to be done will be addressed by this particular paper. As you can see, this presents a research question in a very practical way without actually posing any direct questions at all.