The 27th International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundations for Software Quality (REFSQ 2021) was expected to be held in Essen, Germany, but the COVID-19 pandemic led the organizers to the decision to opt for a virtual conference that took place during April 1215, 2021. The REFSQ working conference series is a leading international forum for discussing requirements engineering (RE) and its role for software quality. The theme of REFSQ 2021 was “Ethics as a cornerstone of Requirements Engineering” to emphasize the importance of human values, such as privacy and fairness, when designing software-intensive systems as well as the challenges that intelligent and autonomous systems pose due to the tight interplay with humans. 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.
1. Preface since it first was held in 2010, and to discuss what the future role of creativity in RE might look like, according to experts in the field. • NLP4RE: 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (organized by Sallam Abualhaija, Fatma Başak Aydemir, Alessio Ferrari, and Jin Guo): The NLP4RE workshop aims to be a meeting point for the researchers working on the natural language processing technologies applied to requirements engineering problems in which the advances, challenges, and barriers that they encounter may be communicated, and collaborations may emerge naturally. • RE4AI: 2nd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Artifical Intelligence (organized by Renata Guizzardi, Jennifer Horkof, Anna Perini and Angelo Susi): 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: Doctoral Symposium The goal of the Doctoral Symposium (organized by Travis Breaux and Xavier Franch) is to provide PhD students with an opportunity to present and discuss their work in early as well as advanced stages of their doctoral reseach, to provide all participant students with advice and suggestions from a panel of senior researchers, and to facilitate interaction among all participants.
OpenRE The goal of the OpenRE (organized by Neil Ernst and Alessio Ferrari) is to broader open science in RE research in order to foster shared resources in RE.
Posters and Tools Track The Posters and Tools Track (organized by Elda Paja and Norbert Seyf) is a forum to present posters and demonstrate tools covering any aspect of RE. It gives researchers the change to present their most recent work and obtain early feedback on ongoing research.