Workshops REFSQ 2024

The REFSQ Working Conferences provide a forum for exchanging innovative ideas and approaches to successful requirements engineering amongst researchers and professionals. The workshop program aims to enrich this forum with events focused on specific areas of RE. A workshop should provide benefits to the RE community along one or more of the following dimensions: innovativeness of the area, high potential for involving both industrial and research actors, influence on industrial practice, or addressing novel trends in software and requirements engineering at large. The format of accepted workshops has flexibility, with both traditional and paperless options. We particularly invite workshops related to the education and training track, collaborative workshops driven by industry or organizations with a strong practical focus, as well as workshops which touch on the conference theme.

Call for Workshop Proposals

The 2024 REFSQ call for workshop proposals welcomes both traditional and paperless workshops. Both workshop types should focus on topics that are interesting and relevant to the REFSQ community.

Traditional workshops involve paper presentations, discussions, and potentially further elements as proposed. These workshops will have papers published in a joint REFSQ workshop CEUR proceedings, unless otherwise requested. Typically, such workshops focus on areas which are well-defined, or are in the process of being defined.

Paperless workshops are typically more collaborative and discussion-oriented and are more flexible with their structure and contents. They do not have traditional proceedings and often assume a more active participation. This type of workshop can focus on newer, less well-defined REFSQ-related topics. For this type of workshop, we particularly welcome proposals from companies or other organizations that can contribute valuable industry perspectives to the community discussions. Industry-driven workshops could focus on practical issues that are relevant to industry, with participation from interested members of the REFSQ community.

Given the REFSQ track on education and training in requirements engineering, we especially encourage related workshop proposals in this area, both traditional and paperless. In addition, in line with REFSQ’s general interest and the special 2024 theme: “Out of the Lab, into the Wild!”, you can find a (non-exclusive) list of further invited topics below.

Invited topics

• RE and Society
• RE and Industry
• Human Factors in RE
• Ethics and RE
• Value-based RE
• RE for Sustainable Systems
• RE Education and Training
• RE for Privacy and Regulatory Compliance
• NLP, Machine Learning, and AI for RE
• RE for NLP, Machine Learning and AI
• Agile, continuous, and flexible RE
• Software Product Management
• Requirements for Software Ecosystems / Systems of Systems
• RE for Self-Adaptive Systems and Context Awareness
• RE for Big Data, RE for the Cloud
• RE for Cyber-Physical Systems
• RE for Collaborative Systems
• RE at Runtime and Uncertainty Management
• Requirements Prioritization, Requirements Quality, Metrics
• Product Line RE, Requirements Reuse
• RE and Security, Trust, Safety, Scalability
• Evolution of Requirements
• Requirements Patterns and Best Practices
• RE in Small Companies and Startups
• Model-Driven Requirements Engineering
• RE in User Centered Design and Design Thinking

Workshop proposal submissions

1. Title of the workshop;
2. Name and contact information of the proposer(s);
3. Duration of the workshop (full or half-day);
4. A statement of the goals and motivation for the workshop;
5. A brief description of the topic of the workshop and a list of related topics;
6. An outline of the workshop format (traditional vs. paperless) and a description of the program, e.g., paper presentations, keynotes, breakout sessions, panel-like discussions, combination; more details on this point are requested for paperless workshops;
7. Outline of paper submission and selection process (if any);
8. Alternative publishing plans, in case something different from CEUR proceedings is expected (especially for paperless workshops);
9. A short description of the target audience and how the workshop will be advertised;
10. Anticipated number of participants, especially any information regarding already confirmed participation is welcome (a must for paperless workshops);
11. A list of past editions of the workshop (if any), including dates, organizers and website, attendance. Also, describe differences to previous editions;
12. A short biography of each workshop organizer.

For each workshop associated with REFSQ, the workshop organizing team should include at least one program chair who does not submit any paper to the workshop.

Submit your proposal via Easychair in PDF format at: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=refsq2024 Make sure to select the Workshop Proposal option.

For any questions and clarifications, please contact: thorsten.weyer@mni.thm.de, and jenho@chalmers.se.

RE4AI 2024: 5th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Artificial Intelligence

RE4AI Website

Nowadays, AI is embedded in software and hardware systems, from everyday objects, such as cars, household appliances, wearable devices, to unmanned military vehicles and arms. Additionally, AI is impacting several industries, and the role of humans in performing professional tasks in creative tasks in domains such as film making, journalism, and research. This fosters discussions about AI opportunities and risks, at social and individual levels, and calls for responsible development of AI. In particular, we have seen in the past few years, a raise in concerns regarding AI systems, including the emergence of manifestos asking for more regulation and even requesting a pause in giant AI experiments. Part of the problems result from a common disregard for Requirements Engineering activities while developing AI systems. RE4AI is a scientific forum to raise awareness and foster valuable research contributions on how Requirements Engineering can support the development of AI systems so that such systems may fulfil their potentials while improving robustness and safety by minimizing errors and considering ethical issues.

Organization: Renata Guizzardi, Khan Mohammad Habibullah, Anna Perini and Angelo Susi

NLP4RE workshop at REFSQ 2024

NLP4RE Website

Natural language processing (NLP) plays an essential role in several areas of software engineering (SE), and requirements engineering (RE) is no exception. Requirements are generally authored and communicated in textual form and different levels of formality, from structured (e.g., user stories) to unstructured natural language. In the last few years, the advent of massive and heterogeneous sources, such as tweets and app reviews, has attracted even more interest from the RE community, and the recent developments in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI have opened new opportunities for RE. LLMs will likely be the enabling technology for solving long-standing RE problems, such as traceability, classification, and compliance. The main goal of NLP4RE is to represent a community-building venue for researchers who apply NLP technologies to solve RE problems and automatically support RE activities. NLP4RE’24 accepts contributions across the entire spectrum of NLP applications for RE, including but not limited to LLMs for RE and RE for LLMs, traditional vs advanced AI techniques, ethical issues, evaluation and datasets, and multi-modal RE.

Organization: Sallam Abualhaija, Chetan Arora, Davide Dell’Anna, Alessio Ferrari and Sepideh Ghanavati

AgileRE workshop

AgileRE Website

In the AgileRE workshop, practitioners and academics are going to review and discuss the current state of the art and practice of agile requirements engineering. Based on presentations from industry and academia and interlaced with hands-on tutorials, the participants will learn about how organisations that employ agile development handle requirements, what scaling means for agile RE, and what the future of requirements engineering in agile environments will hold.

Organization: Fabiano Dalpiaz and Jan-Philipp Steghöfer

Virtues and Values in Requirements Engineering 2024 Workshop (VIVA RE’24)

VIVA RE’24 Website

Including human values into the development of software-intensive systems has long been a topic of discussion. A satisfactory solution such as a collection of (software-supported) methods or a model gallery for ethical argumentation has not yet been developed. This workshop will work on collecting methods for incorporating values into system development. Two particular methods, the Square of Values (SoV) and the Software Sustainability Assessment (SoSA) approaches, will be examined in more detail. A specific focus of the workshop lies on how ethical reasoning can be supported with the help of software-tools.

Organization: Alexander Rachmann and Jens Gulden

Green Digital Design - How can modern RE of digital products contribute to more sustainability?

Green Digital Design Website

As digital designers and requirements engineers, we create digital products. In this role, we are not only responsible for designing the functionality and quality of our products, but also for the impact that the products have in the world. In addition to the planned and expected positive effects that our products have for users and customers, we must also consider the side effects that often occur unintentionally, unplanned and unforeseen. We see it as our duty to develop sustainable digital products, and to achieve this we need to extend our perspective in requirements engineering.

Organization: Andrea Müller, Martina Beck and Dominik Birkmeier

11th International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (CreaRE’24) at REFSQ’24

CreaRE Website

Where do great requirements come from? Technological advancements in the form of amazing new software features, disruptive innovations, emerging new fields such as the Internet of Things and smart ecosystems, and radical enhancements to existing software all rely on one thing: innovative ideas that reinvent the work context, process or experience. Methods such as Design Thinking employ creativity to develop new innovative products and innovate improvements on existing products. With the progress of Artificial Intelligence (AI), innovative ways of the team of AI and humans can create new ideas jointly. The CreaRE workshop provides a platform for introducing, discussing and elaborating on ways to be creative for RE. The participants will learn from the speakers and from each other, and will possibly gain hands-on experiences in applying creativity techniques themselves. Therefore, we are not only inviting research paper submissions but also of interactive sessions.

Organization: Andrea Herrmann, Maya Daneva, Patrick Mennig and Kurt Schneider

From Challenge to Success: JTBD as a Key in Requirements Engineering

Workshop Website

Translating customer needs into solutions is a fascinating challenge of innovation. From the perspective of a client of large IT systems, it involves defining and later managing what is understood as (requirement) quality (alongside the dimensions of time and cost). In an environment of existing legacy IT systems, numerous stakeholders, and a pletho-ra of new technological possibilities, defining (requirement) quality is exceptionally demanding. The Jobs to be Done (JTBD) method, employed by many highly successful companies in the US, offers an approach that significantly contributes to innovative product development, customer centricity and complexity reduction. This consistent shift in perspective towards the customer brings utmost clarity to the solutions needed to fulfil the tasks at hand (the “Jobs”). This enables the creation of a stable foundation for (requirement) quality in the customer’s (or cli-ent’s) language. We, the initiators of this workshop, come from product development, innovation management, and software devel-opment, and have been engaged with this topic for many years. We will present our concrete experiences in applying JTBD across different fields and discuss the unresolved challenges and questions in using JTBD, especially in the context of agile methodologies. The focus of the workshop is on the exchange of experiences. Participants are invited to share their own experiences with the challenges of Requirements Engineering (RE). The workshop is aimed equally at RE researchers and soft-ware practitioners with an industry connection. If there is sufficient interest, we plan to establish an exchange platform for RE-JTBD practice in the future.

Organization: Prof. Dr. Nikolina Fuduric, Dr. Vital Meyer, Christoph Settelen

Co-Creation Workshop: “Low-Code/No-Code Technology for Digital Health Innovation”

Workshop Website

No single industry is left untouched by the digital transformation. The success of this transformation is determined by how well the stakeholders in the specific sectors adopt digital technologies and how productively they utilize them. In the field of digital health innovation, new technologies are increasingly being used, especially at the interfaces between healthcare organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and insurers. In this workshop we focus on low-code/no-code technology that reduces the traditional distance between requirements engineering and software development.

The requirements for these technologies are complex and need to be elicited from heterogeneous sources to ensure full coverage of stakeholders’ needs. Accordingly, many challenges exist, such as: • How to design reliable systems in complex environments with many stakeholders? • How to enhance the communication and interpretation of requirements? • How to effectively reduce the technical knowledge gap of domain experts? • How to actively engage healthcare experts in the software prototyping process? • How to automatically integrate business logic and domain data specified in Excel sheets or other business artifacts? • How to ensure early in the development process that the solution is going to meet the requirements? • How to integrate healthcare-related regulations and standards in software solutions? • How to ensure that digital solutions are sustainable in terms of technical, social, individual, economic, and environmental aspects? • How to enhance the human understanding and evolvability of digital solutions? • Etc. This one-day interactive workshop will engage the participants in the analysis of contemporary challenges with the objective of collaboratively identifying the research and industry actions to achieve sustainable digital health innovation. The envisioned participants include applied researchers and engineers from the MedTech-domain, combined with some interested international experts that attend the main REFSQ 2024 conference. Various aspects on the way from idea to practical implementation and application will be highlighted and discussed in short break-out sessions. The goal is to prepare outlines for Innosuisse project proposals that need to be worked out in small teams after the workshop. The workshop is powered by Innosuisse and co-organised by ZHAW’s Software Engineering research group and the Innovation Booster Artificial Intelligence.

Organization: Innovation Booster Artificial Intelligence: Reik Leiterer. ZHAW: Michael Wahler, Arjan Mooij, David Mosquera, and Marcela Ruiz

Balancing Flexibility and Compliance: Evolutionary Requirements Engineering in Regulated Industry

Managing the delicate dichotomy between evolutionary development’s flexibility and the demands of regulatory compliance presents a substantial challenge for industries like healthcare and aerospace. Traditional evolutionary methodologies highlight the importance of quick adaptation and responsiveness, which appears to be at odds with the thorough documentation and stringent procedures mandated by regulatory bodies, emphasizing fully traceable requirements and product safety. Furthermore, the quest for certification within regulated environments usually incurs considerable expenses, limiting the frequency and extent of development cycles due to the comprehensive validation and documentation necessitated at every phase. Our workshop aims to address these challenges through a practice-oriented approach, identifying strategies to balance this dichotomy effectively.

Organization: Peter Spörri, Consultant, Coach and Board Member at Panter Consulting Company & Thomas Lanz, Head of Optical Measurement Systems at Volpi Group