Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical factor in developing high-quality and successful software, systems, and services. The REFSQ working conference series is an established international forum for discussing current and state-of-the-art RE practices, celebrating its 28th edition.

Working Conference Format

REFSQ has a long tradition of being a highly structured and interactive event. Each session is organized to emphasize discussion among the presenters of papers, pre-assigned discussants, and all the other participants. The REFSQ 2022 program will include keynote speakers, technical papers, research previews, industrial presentations, as well as posters and tools. Workshops and the REFSQ doctoral symposium will be co-located with the main conference.

Scope

REFSQ 2022 seeks reports of novel ideas and techniques that enhance the quality of RE products and processes, reflections on current research and industrial RE practices, as well as new views on RE. We invite submissions on any aspect of RE. We encourage researchers and practitioners from the RE, software engineering, information systems, service science, embedded systems, and product management fields to present original work. RE methods, tools, and processes are expected to support engineering diverse types of systems of different scales and complexity and are applied in diverse domains. As such, contributions from related areas such as systems engineering, economics, and management, providing insights to RE, are welcome.

The special theme of REFSQ 2022 is “Explainability in RE” including how to elicit, specify and validate requirements for explainability in (and thus accountability of) software system, and how to design and implement systems whose behavior in specific instances is explainable, back to their requirements and associated rationale.

Highlights

Accepted Papers

Call for Papers

Submissions

We invite original submissions in several categories:

• Technical design papers (15 pages incl. references) describe the design of new artifacts, i.e., novel solutions for requirements-related problems or significant improvements of existing solutions.
• Scientific evaluation papers (15 pages incl. references) investigate existing real-world problems, evaluate existing real-world implemented artifacts, or validate newly designed artifacts, e.g., by means such as case studies, experiments, simulation, surveys, systematic literature reviews, mapping studies, or action research.
• Vision papers (6 pages incl. references) state where research in the field should be heading.
• Research previews (6 pages incl. references) describe well-defined research ideas at an early stage of investigation which may not be fully developed.

Submission, Reviewing, and Publication

Contributions must be submitted on https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=refsq2022.

Each submission in the scope of REFSQ will undergo a single-blind review process that will involve at least three members of the program committee.

The REFSQ 2022 proceedings will be published in Springer’s LNCS series. We are also planning a special section with a journal for the best papers.

Formatting

All submissions must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS/LNBIP conference proceedings template (for LaTeX and Word): https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines. As per the guidelines, please remember to include keywords after your abstract.

Furthermore, to facilitate accurate bidding and a better understanding of the papers, each paper submitted to REFSQ 2022 is required to have a structured abstract. The imposed structure demands each abstract have exactly 4 paragraphs with the following content:

• Context and motivation: Situate and motivate your research.
• Question/problem: Formulate the specific question/problem addressed by the paper.
• Principal ideas/results: Summarize the ideas and results described in your paper. State, where appropriate, your research approach and methodology.
• Contribution: State the main contribution of your paper. What’s the value you add (to theory, to practice, or to whatever you think that the paper adds value). Also, state the limitations of your results.

Three examples of structured abstracts are given here.

Technical Design Papers

• Hans-Martin Heyn, Padmini Subbiah, Jennifer Linder, Eric Knauss and Olof Eriksson:
  Setting AI in context: A case study on defining the context and operational design domain for automated driving
• Niklas Moller and Jennifer Horkoff:
  Requirements Engineering for Software-Enabled Art: Challenges and Guidelines

Scientific Evaluation Papers

• Marie Farrell, Matt Luckcuck, Oisin Sheridan and Rosemary Monahan:
  FRETting About Requirements
• Maxim Bragilovski, Fabiano Dalpiaz and Arnon Sturm:
  Guided Derivation of Conceptual Models from User Stories: A Controlled Experiment
• Nagadivya Balasubramaniam, Marjo Kauppinen, Kari Hiekkanen and Sari Kujala:
  Transparency and Explainability of AI Systems: Ethical Guidelines in Practice
• Emanuel Dellsen, Karl Westgardh and Jennifer Horkoff:
  Invest in Splitting: User Story Splitting within the Software Industry
• Randell Rasiman, Fabiano Dalpiaz and Sergio España:
  How Effective Is Automated Trace Link Recovery in Model-Driven Development?
• Gunnar Brataas, Geir Kjetil Hanssen, Xinlu Qiu and Lisa Græslie:
  RE in the Market Dialogue of Public Procurement: A Case Study of an Innovation Partnership for Medical Technology
• Michael Anders, Martin Obaidi, Barbara Paech and Kurt Schneider:
  A Study on the Mental Models of Users Concerning Existing Software
• Sylwia Kopczyńska, Daniel Craviee De Abreu Vieira and Mirosław Ochodek:
  How Security Requirements are Tested in Industry? – A Survey Study
• Hussein Hasso, Katharina Großer, Iliass Aymaz, Hanna Geppert and Jan Jürjens:
  Abbreviation-Expansion Pair Detection for Glossary Term Extraction

Research Preview Papers

• Dan Berry:
  Requirements Engineering for Artificial Intelligence: What is a Requirements Specification for an Artificial Intelligence?
• Nedo Bartels and Jaap Gordijn:
  A Business Model Construction Kit for Platform Business Models - Research Preview
• Himaja Cherukuri, Alessio Ferrari and Paola Spoletini:
  Towards Explainable Formal Methods: from LTL to Natural Language with Neural Machine Translation
• Anmol Nayak, Hari Prasad Timmapathini, Vidhya Murali, Karthikeyan Ponnalagu, Vijendran Gopalan Venkoparao and Amalinda Post:
  Req2Spec: Transforming Software Requirements into Formal Specifications using Natural Language Processing
• Waad Alhoshan, Liping Zhao, Alessio Ferrari and Keletso J. Letsholo:
  A Zero-Shot Learning Approach to Classifying Requirements: Preliminary Study
• Guntur Budi Herwanto, Gerald Quirchmayr and A Min Tjoa:
  From User Stories to Data Flow Diagram for Privacy Awareness
• Melanie Busch, Jianwei Shi, Lukas Nagel, Johann Sell and Kurt Schneider:
  Sharpening the Vision through Vision Video Making: A Case Study

Vision Papers

• Wasja Brunotte, Larissa Chazette, Verena Klös and Timo Speith:
  Quo Vadis, Explainability? – A Research Roadmap for Explainability Engineering