The objective of the doctoral symposium is to provide junior researchers, PhD students, with the opportunity to present their work to the REFSQ community and receive valuable feedback from a panel of experts in Requirements Engineering (RE). The symposium also aims at facilitating the exchange of ideas among young researchers. Four papers were selected for presentation at REFSQ 2018 Doctoral Symposium. The presentations were organised in two sessions. Three proposals shared the first session, while the second session included the fourth student presentation and a keynote. In the first presentation Davide Dell'Anna proposed a runtime requirements supervision framework that continuously monitors the execution of socio-technical systems, evaluates their behaviour against the overall goals, and decides which requirements should be revised. Then, Fabian Kneer presented his PhD proposal about environment modelling for complex, dynamic, and distributed systems. In the third presentation Serda Hauser reported on a literature review and an empirical study - the first steps towards building a shared requirements catalogue. Finally, Naomi Unkelos-Shpigel presented her research progress towards developing a framework for systematically designing RE environments embedding gamification techniques. Following the goal of fostering discussion, each paper was assigned 30 minutes, half of the time for presentation, and half of the time for discussion. Experienced members of the RE community served as a panel of experts, and provided feedback to the PhD students presenting their work. 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 2018 organizers, who supported the event; the panel of experts, who provided the reviews and recommendations to the PhD students; and the PhD students who submitted their work and participated in the REFSQ 2018 Doctoral Symposium.
Daniel M. Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada Nelly Condori-Fernandez, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands Barbara Peach, University of Heidelberg, Germany Anna Perini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler Trento, Italy Roel Wieringa, University of Twente, The Netherlands