WorkshopsRequirements Engineering 2023

RE’23 workshops provide opportunities for small-group discussions on topics in requirements engineering research and practice. Workshops also provide opportunities for researchers to exchange and discuss scientific and engineering ideas at an early stage, before they have matured to warrant conference or journal publication.

Call for Workshop Proposals

We invite proposals for workshops to be held in conjunction with the 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’23). RE is the premier forum for presenting and discussing requirements engineering research and practice.

RE’23 workshops will allow participants to exchange new ideas in all areas related to requirements engineering research and practice. A variety of workshop formats can be considered, ranging from traditional paper presentations and discussions to highly interactive and participatory sessions without formal paper presentations. Proposers are encouraged to consider topics aligned with the research themes of RE’23. We particularly invite workshop proposals that cover controversial viewpoints, emerging technology drivers or transformative ideas that have the potential to change basic assumptions about requirements engineering. Discussions at workshops may lead to interesting follow-up research, empirical investigations or improvement to industry practice.

An RE workshop can be a half-day, full-day or two-day event and will take place on the first two days of RE’23. All workshops are planned as in-person workshops in Hannover.

Submission of Proposals

Workshop proposals must not exceed four pages and must be submitted as one PDF using the IEEE conference template. Please find here more information on the templates: Link.

Proposals should contain the following sections:

• Header: Workshop title and acronym, contact information for the workshop organizers (name, affiliation, email) and the main contact.

• Workshop Motivation and Objectives: This section should explain the motivation and objectives of the workshop and related topics. This section should clarify the relation between the workshop’s topic and the conference’s main theme and the anticipated outcomes of the workshop (e.g., open research problems to pursue, empirical studies, etc.). If your workshop is accepted, then this description will be used for early publicity for the workshop.
• Target Audience: What type of background should the workshop attendees have? Will there be a mix of industry and academic participants? What is the expected number of participants (minimum and maximum)? Is the workshop open to the public or by invitation only?
• Workshop Format: Will the workshop be a half-day workshop or a full-day workshop? What will be the format for the workshop, e.g., paper presentations, keynotes, breakout sessions, panel-like discussions, a combination, etc.? What are the plans for facilitating discussions between participants? How will the organizers support an online or hybrid event if needed?
• Paper solicitation and selection: How will submissions and participation be encouraged? How will papers be selected? How many people will be on the program committee? Please list the names of PC members if the committee has been tentatively invited.
• Proceedings: How many and what type of papers will be solicited (number of pages and type: extended abstracts, position and/or research papers, etc.)? What type of evaluation process will be used to decide on accepted papers? As in previous years, we are planning to publish the workshop proceedings in the IEEE Digital Library as a separate volume of the conference proceedings. If you wish to use a different publishing plan, then describe how you intend to disseminate the workshop proceedings.
• Workshop History: Have you offered this workshop before? If so, please provide a history of the venues, dates, approximate attendance numbers, and link to the website (if still available).
• Required Services: What special services are needed? For example, standard services may include a student volunteer.
• Organizers’ Bios: Please provide a brief 2-3-sentence biography for each of the workshop organizers that highlight their qualifications with respect to the workshop. Mention also the experience in organizing scientific events and workshops in particular.

Proposals must be submitted via the EasyChair submission page: Link to EasyChair (select the "RE’23 Workshops" track)

Workshop Proposal Evaluation Criteria

• Evaluation of the workshop’s potential to advance the state of requirements engineering research and/or practice.
• Relevance to requirements engineering and topics targeted for RE’23.
• Potential for attracting a sufficient number of participants.
• Organizers’ ability to lead a successful workshop.

Workshop Organizer Responsibilities

If a workshop proposal is accepted, workshop organizers are responsible for the following:

• Creating a website for workshop and a call for papers/contributions
• Publicizing the workshop
• Establishing a PC, ensuring a diverse membership
• Soliciting, collecting and evaluating paper submissions
• Ensuring a transparent and fair paper selection process, including proper handling of conflicts of interest
• Notifying authors of acceptance or rejection
• Creating the workshop program
• Responding to requests by the RE’23 Workshop Co-Chairs in due time.

For accepted workshops, the following conditions apply:

• All accepted workshops will have to comply with the key dates.
• All workshop participants, including organizers and keynote speakers or invited speakers, must register for the workshop.
• RE’23 reserves the right to cancel workshops that fail to attract a reasonable number of submissions, have no detailed workshop program, or have insufficient registrations after the early registration deadline.

Key Dates

• Workshop proposals due: January 20, 2023
• Notification of workshop submitters: February 14, 2023
• Workshop web pages up: February 28, 2023
• Workshop summary (for RE’23 website) sent to Workshop Co-chairs: February 28, 2023
• Workshop CfP ready: March 14, 2023
• Workshop paper abstracts due (optional): June 02, 2023
• Workshop papers due: June 09, 2023
• Workshop paper notification: July 07, 2023
• Workshop paper camera-ready: July 14, 2023
• Workshop preface / extended keynote abstract camera-ready: July 13, 2023
• Workshop dates: TBD

All deadlines are 23:59 Anywhere on Earth (Standard Time).

Workshops Co-chairs

Anne Hess ( Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany)
Elda Paja (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark)

Please feel free to contact the workshop co-chairs via email:
Anne Hess: Anne.Hess@iese.fraunhofer.de
Elda Paja: elpa@itu.dk

RE’23 will host the following workshops (in alphabetical order):

Acronym	Full Name	Website
AffectRE	Affective Computing in Requirements Engineering	Link
AIRE	Artificial Intelligence and Requirements Engineering	Link
CrowdRE	Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering	Link
EmpiRE	Empirical Requirements Engineering	Link
EnviRE	Environment-Driven Requirements Engineering	Link
ESPRE	Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering	Link
iStar	i* Workshop	Link
MoDRE	Model-Driven Requirements Engineering	Link
RE4ES	Requirements Engineering for Explainable Systems	Link
REFrame	Requirements Engineering Frameworks	Link
RESET	Requirements Engineering for Software startups and Emerging Technologies	Link
REWBAH	Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health	Link
SST	Software and Systems Traceability	Link

Summary of the workshops

(in alphabetical order)

AffectRE: International Workshop on Affective Computing in Requirements Engineering

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

Affective computing encompasses a broad field of research ranging from emotion recognition in development artifacts to interdisciplinary problem solving, and is of interest to software systems as they are designed and used by humans. For requirements engineering (RE), the understanding and use of human and social aspects plays a crucial role in various facets ranging from the consideration of individual professionals and team performance during RE activities to the use of end-user emotions as a means to validate requirements. The AffectRE workshop aims to create an international, sustainable community where researchers and practitioners can meet, present, and discuss their current work to impact the RE community with ideas from the field of Affective Computing. In its fifth edition, this workshop encourages high quality contributions of empirical studies, theoretical models, and tools that raise awareness of emotions in RE.

AIRE: International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Requirements Engineering

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

AIRE workshop aims to explore synergies between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Requirements Engineering (RE). AI offers a variety of technologies that can be used to solve complex RE problems, and RE addresses major challenges in designing, developing and deploying AI systems. AIRE helps study the interrelation and mutual benefits between AI and RE. AIRE creates a platform that fosters the communication between industry and academia and between researchers in these fields. Contributions to AIRE facilitate building and sharing standard datasets that can be used to advance the state of the art in RE and/or AI. These datasets can also be as benchmarks to enable comparison between different systems and approaches similar to common practices in other communities like Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Finally, the workshop gives researchers an opportunity to showcase and get feedback on their work through informal tool demonstrations.

CrowdRE: International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

Traditional requirements engineering (RE) techniques have difficulties scaling up to settings with thousands up to millions of users of a (software) product. Now that these users can easily interact among themselves and with the development company, they form a large and heterogeneous group that can be denoted as a ‘crowd’. Researchers have identified several issues with applying RE in the new crowd paradigm. Methods and tools are being investigated, but we see the need for more tailored and holistic approaches, focusing on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering. The International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE) aims to attract papers with novel and innovative ideas on involving the crowd and collecting, harmonizing, analyzing, and interpreting their user feedback. In this regard, CrowdRE intends to facilitate interactive discussions between scientists and representatives of industry in order to analyze the state of the art and to inspire each other in ways to move forward together.

EmpiRE: International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a well-established discipline where a wide range of approaches, techniques, and tools have been proposed. Systematic attempts to evaluate and compare usefulness, effectiveness, and usability of such proposals resulted in a growing attention to methods for empirical assessment. Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) aims at applying the empirical research methodologies to the software engineering field. In other terms, it aims at studying and proposing qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze evidence that helps evaluate software engineering approaches, techniques and tools. Design science, action research, case studies and experiments, hence, become indispensable and valuable ways to check proposals with respect to reality, thus allowing us to understand their actual value, cost, and benefits in particular contexts. The objective of the EmpiRE workshop series is to increase the cross-fertilization of ESE methods and RE by actively encouraging the exchange of ideas to understand why and how the empirical methods from ESE can help to assess and improve existing or new approaches in RE. Building on the success of seven workshop editions in the period of 2011-2018, the goal of the proposed 8th edition of EmpiRE is to shape the next phase of cross-fertilization of RE and ESE, specifically: (i) to open up the interdisciplinary debate on the steadily moving frontiers in empirical RE, and (ii) to extend the network of RE and ESE researchers designing and conducting empirical studies in RE, which in turn will lead to the cross-fertilization between RE and ESE.

EnviRE: Workshop on Environment-Driven Requirements Engineering

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

No matter what machine the software engineers build, the requirements are located in the environment" [Jackson’97]. This environment is part of the real world in which the machine is installed and the machine’s effect is observed and evaluated. The re-emergence of AI (especially the black-box deep learning solutions) and the unstoppable penetration of AI-based systems across industries, public sectors, and all walks of life make it important and timely for the requirements engineering (RE) community to discuss the role of environment in driving various activities: elicitation, modeling, implementation, testing, deployment, and evolution. With the machine becoming more intelligent and embedded, the environment is more open and dynamic. This year’s workshop objectives are to bring the interested researchers and practitioners together, exchange ideas, discuss ongoing work, and work together as a community to explore the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT as a requirements modeling helper. In particular, the workshop participants will work in small groups on an agreed set of RE problems (scenarios), and interact with ChatGPT to build a requirements model in problem frames, goal models, UMLs, etc. Throughout this working session, we will share our experience as a community in the kinds of good and bad questions that ChatGPT responses, the resulting model’s quality or the lack thereof, etc.

ESPRE: Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering Workshop

will take place on Monday (September, 4)

The 10th Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering (ESPRE) Workshop is a multi-disciplinary, one-day online workshop. It brings together practitioners and researchers interested in security and privacy requirements. ESPRE probes the interfaces between Requirements Engineering and Security & Privacy, and aims to evolve security and privacy requirements engineering to meet the needs of stakeholders; these range from business analysts and security engineers, to technology entrepreneurs and privacy advocates.

iStar: International i* Workshop

will take place on Sunday (September, 3 with an celebratory event) and on Monday (September, 4)

The iStar workshop series is dedicated to the discussion of concepts, methods, techniques, tools, and applications associated with i* (iStar) and related goal modeling frameworks and approaches such as Tropos, GRL and others. The iStar’23 workshop is the latest of sixteen (16) successful editions beginning in Trento in 2002, and followed by London (2005), Recife (2008), Hammamet (2010), Trento (2011), Valencia (2013), Thessaloniki (2014), Ottawa (2015), Beijing (2016), Essen (2017), Tallinn (2018), Salvador (2019), Zürich (2020), St. John’s (2021) and Hyderabad (2022). As in these previous editions, the objective of the workshop is to provide a unique opportunity for researchers in the area to exchange ideas, compare notes, promote interactions, and forge new collaborations. Expected outcomes include the communication of early results and new ideas to fellow researchers for feedback, the identification of the current problems and promising future research directions and the fostering of awareness, collaboration and interoperability in the area of tool development.

MoDRE: International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering Workshop

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

The 13th International Model-Driven Requirements Engineering (MoDRE) workshop continues to provide a forum to discuss the challenges of Model-Driven Development (MDD) for Requirements Engineering (RE). Building on the interest of MDD for design and implementation, RE may benefit from MDD techniques when properly balancing flexibility for capturing varied user needs with formal rigidity required for model transformations as well as high-level abstraction with information richness. MoDRE seeks to explore those areas of RE that have not yet been formalized sufficiently to be incorporated into an MDD environment as well as how RE models can benefit from emerging topics in the model-driven community, such as flexible, collaborative, and AI-enabled modeling. In accordance with this year’s RE conference theme, we would like to push the boundaries of MoDRE by emphasizing on the exploration of novel RE areas through model-based techniques. We look forward to identifying new challenges for MoDRE, discussing on-going work and potential solutions, analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of MDD approaches for RE, fostering stimulating discussions on the topic, and providing opportunities to apply MDD approaches for RE.

RE4ES: Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Explainable Systems

will take place on Monday (September, 4)

Explainability has become a hot topic and communities from different areas of knowledge (e.g., machine learning, hci, philosophy, psychology, cyber-physical and recommender systems) have been researching it actively. Yet, the requirements engineering (RE) research community seems to be less concerned with the issue. At the same time, our community is extremely rich in methods and techniques that facilitate software development. This would add a lot of value to the explainability research and also ensure that we develop such techniques in parallel to the needs of other communities. Based on this motivation, we want to offer a workshop with three objectives: advancing RE for explainable systems, community building, and interdisciplinary exchange.

REFrame: International Workshop on Requirements Engineering Frameworks: Reframing Elicitation

will take place on Monday (September, 4)

The REFrame workshop is a forum for discussing questions and exchanging experiences concerning frameworks for requirements engineering (RE, RE frameworks). Special focus of REFrame 2/2023 is requirements elicitation. It brings together participants from scientific research and from industrial practice.

RESET: Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Software startups and Emerging Technologies

will take place on Monday (September, 4)

The goal of this workshop is to bring together requirements engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the need for adapting conventional requirement engineering artifacts (i.e. requirement definition, metrics), processes, and practices to software projects in a startup context and dealing with emerging technologies. RESET includes discovering stakeholders’ needs in a startup context and within this context the RE activities for emerging technologies, e.g., Internet of Things applications and Artificial Intelligence.

REWBAH: International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health

will take place on Tuesday (September, 5)

The Fourth International Workshop on REWBAH fosters discussion related to requirements engineering resulting from the need to build software systems that not only support healthcare, but also promote well-being, encourage patients and the population in general to live according to healthy lifestyle recommendations, and address the specific needs of an aging population. This multidisciplinary workshop will bring together practitioners and researchers from relevant disciplines. Among other objectives, REWBAH aims to i) develop RE approaches that support multiple perspectives of well-being, aging, and health (WBAH); ii) develop methods for defining and monitoring requirements of systems and services that promote well-being or health; and iii) identify open research and industry challenges, as well as validation objectives for proposed solutions. After three successful online REWBAH workshops, the time has come to meet in person.

SST: Software and Systems Traceability Workshop

will take place on Monday (September, 4)

The Software and Systems Traceability Workshop (SST’23) provides opportunities for the entire community to meet and exchange ongoing work as well as current developments in the field. The workshop will be highly interactive, with short paper presentations about ongoing and early work, a keynote, and many possibilities for exchange and networking. SST’23 will instil a renewed sense that the topics of Software and Systems Traceability continue to be relevant, that there are many groups in the world contributing to the state of the art, and that there are many interesting opportunities to collaborate across groups. It will be a networking event in which dormant collaborations can be rekindled and new ones formed. It will also be an opportunity for young researchers to get to know the community – an opportunity many of them did not have during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to present ongoing and early work as well as tools which are currently being developed. Presentations, discussions, demos, and keynotes as well as a workshop dinner for all attendees are going to round out the program.