Call for Papers

The industry track accepts the following types of industrial contributions:

Guidelines for Full Industry Papers

Industry papers must be based on a strong connection to the industrial context. They should adhere to the following guidelines.

Clearly describe the context of the problem and why a practical solution is important to the industry. Indicate who has been impacted, for how long time, how new the problem is, and what the trigger of the problem is.

Identify prior work. You are not expected to have performed a systematic literature review as you would for the research track. However, identify if you are applying your own or someone else’s previously published ideas. Cite this related work.

Explain what you did and the results you have obtained. What were the environment and the problem that you have investigated? How did you develop and apply any solutions? What were the results, impact, and lessons learned? Provide concise descriptions and rationales for your choices.

Describe your findings with supporting data, and do not base your arguments on just your personal opinion or conjecture. Industry track papers may be based on topics for which there was originally no expectation of writing a paper and consequently no controlled data gathering. Use the data you have and collect inputs and opinions from those who were involved.

Discuss what makes your contribution innovative. significant, and useful for industry. To explain what is new, compare your results with relevant alternatives. If the findings were negative, provide a thorough discussion of the potential causes of failure, and ideally a perspective on how to solve them.

What is the Difference between Research and Industry Track Papers?

Authors sometimes ask for guidance as to the track to which they should submit their paper.

Example papers that should be submitted to the Research Track

• A review of previous research or literature on a given topic
• A proposed new technique that industry could employ in the future, based on interviews with a company’s employees and analysis of data
• A proposed new technique that industry could employ in the future, based on a trial in an industrial setting with simulated data
• An exploration of the history, successes, and challenges of requirements related practices and/or vision of future directions based on the author’s work with practitioners

Example papers that could be submitted to the Research or Industry Track

• An analysis of the state of the art across multiple companies
• A description of the practices of a particular company by an employee or non-employee (e.g. a consultant or independent researcher)

Example papers that should be submitted to the Industry Track

• A proposed new technique that industry could employ in the future, based on a practitioner’s work experience
• A proposed new technique that industry could employ in the future, based on a trial in an industrial setting performed by practitioners doing their daily work
• The deployment of an existing or new technique to practitioners doing their daily work, regardless of failure or success
• An exploration of the history, successes, and challenges of requirements related practices and/or vision of future directions based on the author’s work as a practitioner

Topics of Interest

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

Innovation with Requirements Engineering

• Use of requirements engineering to address societal, economic, or corporate challenges
• Use of requirements engineering to leverage emerging technologies such as Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, 5G, or Blockchain
• Requirements engineering for ensuring the trustworthiness and fairness of AI-enabled systems
• Innovation through networking, community-building, and creativity
• Enablement of value chains or software ecosystems

Stakeholder Management

• Requirements elicitation and negotiation
• Work in multi-party consortia or geographically dispersed teams
• Involvement of the crowd for requirements elicitation, analysis, and validation

Pragmatic Requirements Engineering

• Good-enough requirements engineering
• Agile and lean approaches
• Domain-specifics and special contexts for requirements engineering such as Open-source or API development

Requirements Specification

• Natural language
• Formal and model-driven approaches
• Work on complex systems or product lines
• Traceability

Addressing Quality with Requirements Engineering

• Ethics, compliance, and risk management
• User experience, privacy, safety, and security
• Sustainability
• Approaches for requirements testing, validation, and impact management

Product Lifecycle Management

• Value creation techniques
• Product planning and evolution
• Dissemination and cooperation with media, marketing, sales, and support

Industry Experiences of Requirements Engineering

• Deploying new or improved processes
• Transferring technology from academia to industry or within industry
• Tooling for requirements engineering or management
• Training and certification for practitioners
• Learning from practice and improving productivity
• Identifying industry best practices and benchmarks

Full industry papers may be up to 10 pages long, plus 1 additional page for references, and will be peer-reviewed. The accepted papers will be included in the IEEE proceedings for the conference and presented at RE’21.

Presentation-only submissions recognize that practitioners often perform innovative work that would be valuable to share but do not publish it in paper form. We, therefore, accept presentations of strong work performed in the industry at RE’20 based on the submission of a 300-words extended abstract and draft slides (full paper not necessary). These presentations will not be eligible for publication in the conference proceedings.

RE’21 will provide you with an opportunity to share interests and discuss ideas with fellow practitioners and researchers. You will join the global network of requirements engineering experts across industry and academia and have a chance to influence the development of the field.