Welcome to the Second International Workshop on
    Learning from Other Disciplines for RE (D4RE’19)

“[…] we can improve the requirements engineering field by learning from other disci-
plines. 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 work-
shop, 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.

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 prac-
tices 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 dis-
ciplines.
In the context of the workshop, there will be a paper presentation about synergies be-
tween 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



1
 S. Robertson, “Learning from other disciplines,” in IEEE Software, vol. 22, no. 3, pp.
54-56, May/Jun 2005.
scene investigation, securing of evidence, as well as psychological techniques / ques-
tion 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 tech-
niques that adapt ideas from the police domain and the human factors domain, respec-
tively.

We would like to thank all Program Committee members for their support and dedica-
tion 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.

Anne Hess, Fraunhofer IESE
Marcus Trapp, Fraunhofer IESE
Kim Lauenroth, adesso AG
Norbert Seyff, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland &
University of Zurich
Oliver Karras, Leibniz University Hannover
(The D4RE’19 Organizing Team)