Research PapersREFSQ 2021

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 26th year.

The special theme of REFSQ 2021 is “Ethics as a cornerstone of Requirements Engineering” to emphasize the importance of human values, such as privacy and fairness, when designing software-intensive systems as well as the challenges that intelligent and autonomous systems pose due to the tight interplay with humans.

Other Contributions

REFSQ 2021 also calls for workshops focussing on relevant topics, posters and tools, doctoral symposium submissions, and an OpenRE track. Information will follow soon!

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Call for Papers

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 27th year.

Working Conference Format

REFSQ has a long tradition of being a highly structured and interactive event. Each session is organised to emphasize discussion among the presenters of papers, pre-assigned discussants, and all the other participants. The REFSQ’21 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 2021 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 scale 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 2021 is “Ethics as a cornerstone of Requirements Engineering” to emphasize the importance of human values, such as privacy and fairness, when designing software-intensive systems as well as the challenges that intelligent and autonomous systems pose due to the tight interplay with humans.

Submissions

We invite original submissions in several categories:

• Technical design papers (15 pages) 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) 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) state where research in the field should be heading.

• Research previews (6 pages) describe well-defined research ideas at an early stage of investigation which may not be fully developed.

Formatting

All submission 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 2021 is required to have a structured abstract. The imposed structure demands each abstract to 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.

Submission, Reviewing and Publication

Contributions must be submitted on https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=refsq2021.

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 2021 proceedings will be published in Springer’s LNCS series. The best papers will be invited to a special issue of the Requirements Engineering Journal.