This document is the preface of the Joint Proceedings of Workshops, Doctoral Symposium, Posters & Tools Track, and Journal Early Feedback Track of the 29th International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2023), 17th-20th April 2023, held in The 29th International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2023) took place from the 17th to the 20th of April 2023. The conference was held as a live, in-person event in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain. 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 “Human Values in Requirements Engineering ” aiming to answer questions such as: How do we take care of human values in RE? How do we ensure that the systems we design incorporate the values we want them to stand for? How do we validate and measure values? 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. On the workshop day, 17th of March, four workshops and the Doctoral Symposium were organized, whereas the Posters and Tools Track took place on the 18th of March. A new track, called Journal Early Feedback, was also established this year, aiming at providing feedback to journal papers that were not published yet, or were under review.
(B. Penzenstadler)
The four workshops at REFSQ 2022 were carefully selected based on their quality, attractiveness, and their potential to attract attendants, which was led by our co-chairs Irit Hadar and and Shola Oydeji. This resulted in the following workshops: • NLP4RE: 6th Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (https://nlp4re.github.io/2023/), organised by Sallam Abualhaija, Andreas Vogelsang, and Gouri Deshpande. 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. • ViVA RE!: 1st Workshop on Virtues and Values in Requirements Engineering (https://sites.google.com/view/ViVaRE23) organised by Alexander Rachmann and Jens Gulden. The workshop provides a theoretical and practical introduction into the Square of Values (SoV) approach. After presenting the concepts behind the SoV, participants practically apply the approach along with ethical case studies. Subsequently, there is a guided discussion about how appropriate the approach is for ethical system design. The workshop is paperless, and does not expect participants to submit a contribution beforehand. The participants are expected to contribute to the interactive modelling sessions. • REFrame: 1st Workshop on Requirements Engineering Frameworks (http://reframe.andrea-wohlgemuth.de/) organised by Andrea Wohlgemuth, Anne Hess, and Samuel Fricker. The REFrame workshop aims to bring together a diversity of people who are interested in reflecting on and discussing current research, challenges, and experiences related to science-driven development and industrially relevant application of frameworks for requirements engineering. Moreover, the workshop is intended to identify future research topics and collaboration possibilities, with the ultimate goal of collaboratively building and publishing a compendium of frameworks (respectively best practices) that can be used and applied when it comes to solving RE-specific challenges. • RE4AI: 4th Workshop on Requirements Engineering for Artificial Intelligence (https://sites.google.com/view/re4ai) organised by Renata Guizzardi, Jennifer Horkof, Anna Perini, and Angelo Susi. The main goals of the RE4AI Workshop are: 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; motivating cross-fertilization between AI and RE works. This is a paperless workshop, which mixes invited talks and interactive sessions.
The proceedings also contain the content of the following tracks: • Doctoral Symposium: The goal of the Doctoral Symposium (organised by Fabiano Dalpiaz and Ana Moreira) 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 (organised by Sallam Abualhaija and Oliver Karras) 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.
Furthermore, it contains the preface of the Journal Early Feedback track, organised by Paola Spoletini and Daniel Amyot. This track was paperless, and thus does not include papers as part of the proceedings.