The 26th International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality was supposed to take place from March 24th to March 27th, 2020 in Pisa, Italy. Unfortunately, the conference had to be postponed due to the worldwide outbreak of the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19). The proceedings of the main conference as well as the satellite events were published in March 2020 as planned. REFSQ Working Conferences aim at providing a forum for new and innovative ideas and approaches to successful Requirements Engineering (RE) and for exchange between researchers and practitioners. The special theme of REFSQ'20 is \RE and Cyber-Physical Systems" to emphasize the role that RE can play in the design of the next generation of systems where people, and physical and software components interact in many di erent ways. The REFSQ conferences also have a tradition of hosting associated events, where participants are able to focus on emerging topics of RE as the foundation of software quality. The co-located events kept also in mind the special theme of the conference. On the workshop day, March 24th, three workshops and the doctoral symposium were organized, whereas the live studies and posters and tools track session took place during the remaining conference days. The three workshops at REFSQ'20 were carefully selected based on their quality, attractiveness, and their potential to attract attendants. This led to the following workshops: NLP4RE: 3rd Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (organized by Sallam Abualhaija, Davide Fucci, Fabiano Dalpiaz, and Xavier Franch): Natural language processing (NLP) has played an important role in several computer science areas and requirements engineering (RE) is not an exception. In the last years, the advent of massive and very heterogeneous natural language (NL) RErelevant sources, like tweets and app reviews, has attracted even more interest from the RE community. The main goal of the NLP4RE workshop is to set up a regular meeting point for the researchers on NLP technologies in RE in which the advances, challenges, and barriers that they encounter may be communicated, and collaborations may emerge naturally. CreaRE: 9th International Workshop on Creativity in Requirements Engineering (organized by Andrea Herrmann, Maya Daneva, and Eduard Groen): The CreaRE workshop brings together RE practitioners and researchers who are interested in discussing the role of creativity in RE, the array of creativity techniques that can be applied to RE, and the ways in which creativity techniques from other disciplines can be leveraged in RE. It also aims at raising awareness in the RE community of the importance of creativity techniques, and creative elements in RE and development processes.
Preface RE4AI: 1st International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Arti cial Intelligence (organized by Renata Guizzardi, Jennifer Horko , Anna Perini and Angelo Susi): Nowadays AI is embedded in software and hardware systems, from everyday objects, such as cars, household appliances, wearable devices, to unmanned military vehicles and arms. Since several years ago, AI researchers have manifested their worries and recommendations for the responsible use of data, employment of discrimination-free algorithms, alignment of AI-based systems and technologies with human values and transparency. However, it is hard to imagine that AI systems will achieve these attributes without accounting for a strong emphasis on capturing and maintaining \the right" requirements, and making sure that the system is validated to properly meet such requirements. The main goals of the RE4AI workshop include raising awareness in the RE community about the importance of RE in realizing Trustworthy AI systems; bringing in the same room people from AI and RE industry and academia to discuss pressing issues, such as how RE can contribute to prevent AI systems to fail or to go rogue; setting up the basis for collaboratively producing a report on the challenges, candidate solution paths, and research priorities regarding RE4AI; and motivating cross fertilization between AI and RE works.
These proceedings contain also the content of the following tracks: REFSQ'20 Doctoral Symposium The goals of the Doctoral Symposium (organized by Maya Daneva and Vincenzo Gervasi) is to provide PhD students with an opportunity to present and discuss their work in early as well as advanced stages of their doctoral research, to provide all participant students with advice and suggestions from a panel of senior researchers, and to facilitate interaction among all the participants. Live Studies The main goal of the Live Studies (organized by Nelly C. Fernandez and Luisa Mich) is to stimulate discussion on how to assess state-of-art, how to generalize from empirical studies, and how to set up longitudinal studies.
Posters and Tools Track The Posters and Tools Track (organized by Markus Borg and Eduard C. Groen) is a forum to present posters and demonstrate tools covering any aspect of RE. It gives researchers the chance to present their most recent work and obtain early feedback on ongoing research.
We would like to thank all Workshop, Doctoral Symposium, Live Studies Track, and Posters and Tools Track Chairs as well as their Program Committees for their diligence in selecting the papers and ensuring their high scienti c quality.