“[…] we can improve the requirements engineering field by learning from other disciplines. Other professions have already solved problems and come up with techniques that we can reuse if only we take the trouble to make the necessary abstractions.1” This quote perfectly supports and expresses the overall motivation for the D4RE'19 workshop, which is to answer the question: “What can requirements engineering (RE) learn from other disciplines?” Interestingly, we might already be familiar with best practices from other disciplines we know, for instance from movies, or we might even use them already in our daily life (e.g., in our leisure time when playing soccer or acting in a theater play). But it is quite possible that we never imagined that these best practices might also be adaptable and transferable to the context of RE. This workshop is intended to bring together researchers and practitioners to look across the boundaries of RE and software engineering, to check what we can learn from other disciplines, and to adopt best practices from these disciplines in order to increase and improve the impact of RE-related activities. The anticipated outcomes of this workshop include a body of best practices from other disciplines that can serve as a source of inspiration for people from both academia and industry. 1 S. Robertson, “Learning from other disciplines,” in IEEE Software, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 54-56, May/Jun 2005.
We organized a first successful edition of the D4RE workshop collocated with RE’18 in Banff, Canada. Together with 15 participants, we selected three disciplines out of an existing body of ideas, namely journalism/writing, socializing, and law. In two breakout sessions, we discussed and elaborated ideas for new RE methods adopting best practices from the three selected disciplines with the help of creativity techniques. Besides a visionary description of an adopted RE activity, we identified open issues, possible risks, and future research activities to shape the initial ideas for the RE activities. This second edition of the D4RE workshop aims to further enrich our existing body of ideas and synergies of non-SE disciplines with RE by focusing on completely new disciplines.
In the context of the workshop, there will be a paper presentation about synergies between RE and human factors. Furthermore, we are very pleased that Markus Wiener has accepted our invitation to give an opening keynote entitled “Sherlock Freud – How to Benefit from Criminal Investigation and Psychology in Requirements Engineering”. Markus Wiener is a former police officer currently working as an RE consultant at SOPHIST GmbH. In his talk, he will give the audience insights into the daily work of a police officer, sharing his experience in applying techniques such as profiling, crime scene investigation, securing of evidence, as well as psychological techniques / question techniques during interrogations. Moreover, he will share his view on how RE elicitation techniques such as interviews and workshops can be improved by learning from interrogations in the police domain.
The insights from these two talks will ultimately serve as inspiration for the creativity sessions, where our aim is to collaboratively work on innovative RE methods and techniques that adapt ideas from the police domain and the human factors domain, respectively.
We would like to thank all Program Committee members for their support and dedication regarding the valuable and timely paper reviews. We are also very grateful to Markus Wiener as well as to the authors of the submitted paper for sharing their thoughts, ideas, and experiences with the workshop. Last, but not least, our thanks go to the REFSQ 2019 Workshop Chairs, particularly Paola Spoletini and Patrick Mäder, for their support in organizing this workshop.
We look forward to the workshop in Essen and hope that you will find the workshop results and proceedings inspiring and valuable.