The objective of the doctoral symposium is to provide junior researchers with the opportunity to present their work to the REFSQ community and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts in Requirements Engineering. Experienced members of the Requirements Engineering community served in this panel of experts, and provided feedback to students presenting their work. The symposium also aims at facilitating the exchange of ideas among young researchers. Four papers were selected for presentation at REFSQ 2017 DocSymp, with one paper withdrawing. The three proposals shared a session, with the second session holding our keynote. The first proposal presented an empirical evaluation of architectural thinking for requirements gathering. The second proposal used ontologies to improve requirements quality, while the third proposal focused on requirements engineering for large-scale Agile Development. Following the goal of fostering discussion, each paper was assigned 30 minutes, half of the time for presentation, half of the time for discussion. Each paper received feedback from our panel of experts. The event closed with an excellent keynote talk given by Prof. Dan Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada, entitled “How to Finish that Damn PhD”. We would like to thank all the people involved in the organization of the event: the REFSQ 2017 organizers, who supported the event; the panel of experts (see next page for the listing), who provided the reviews and participated in the event; and the PhD students who submitted their work for consideration to the symposium, particularly those who presented and participated in the REFSQ 2017 DocSymp.
Daniel M. Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada Sjaak Brinkkemper, Utrecht University, The Netherlands Maya Daneva, University of Twente, The Netherlands Erik Kamsties, Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Germany Oscar Pastor, Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain