The 28th International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2022) took place from the 21st to the 24th of March 2022. In compliance with current COVID guidelines for hosting safe events, the conference was held as a live, in-person event in Aston, Birmingham, UK. REFSQ Working Conferences aim to provide a forum for discussing new and innovative ideas and approaches to successful Requirements Engineering (RE) and for exchange between researchers and practitioners. The special theme of REFSQ'22 was “Explainability in Requirements Engineering” including how to elicit, specify and validate requirements for explainability in software systems, and how to design and implement systems whose behavior in specific instances is explainable, back to their requirements and associated rationale. 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. Also the co-located events kept in mind the special theme of the conference.
jannik.fischbach@netlight.com
(J. Fischbach)
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RE community. The main goal of the NLP4RE workshop is to serve as a regular meeting point for the researchers on NLP technologies in RE. NLP4RE aims to promote the timely communication of advances, challenges, and barriers that the researchers encounter, and the workshop wishes to provide a friendly venue where collaborations may emerge naturally. • RE4AI: 3rd International Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Artificial 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. • DT: Design Thinking, Design Fiction and Requirements Engineering (organized by Andrew Darby, Peter Sawyer, Wei Liu, and Nelly Bencomo). The goal of the workshop is to gain a better understanding of how the RE community is responding to technological/societal/political and other forms of volatility that shape some of the wicked problems they address. What can RE learn from recent examples of systems that have inadvertently harmed business, society, or people? What can RE learn from design thinking, design ifction, and their speculative strategies?
Due to current uncertainties caused by the COVID pandemic and many concurrent deadlines, the workshops received fewer submissions than usual. This led to the decision of joining the NLP4RE workshop and RE4AI workshop into a one-day workshop. Accordingly, the proceedings contain a joint section of four NLP4RE papers and one RE4AI paper. The proceedings contain also the content of the following tracks: Doctoral Symposium The goal of the Doctoral Symposium (organized by Liliana Pasquale and Andrea Zisman) 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 participants.
Posters and Tools Track The Posters and Tools Track (organized by Marcela Ruiz and JanPhilipp Steghöfer) 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.