9th International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering

co-located with the 32nd IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference

Reykjavik, Iceland, June 24, 2024

Requirements Engineering (RE) has become a well-established discipline where a wide range of approaches, techniques, and tools have been proposed. In RE, Social Sciences (SoS) play also a crucial role by providing valuable insights concerning, in particular, user behavior, preferences, and societal needs . Systematic attempts to evaluate and compare usefulness, effectiveness, and usability of RE proposals resulted in a growing attention to methods for empirical assessment.  

Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) aims at applying the empirical research methodologies to the software engineering field. In other terms, it aims at studying and proposing qualitative and quantitative methods to collect and analyze evidence that helps evaluate software engineering approaches, techniques and tools. Design science, action research, case studies and experiments, hence, become indispensable and valuable ways to check proposals with respect to the reality, thus allowing to understand their actual value, cost, and benefits in particular contexts. The long-term objective of the Workshop series on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE) is to increase the cross-fertilization of ESE methods and RE by actively encouraging the exchange of ideas to understand why and how the empirical methods from ESE (and potentially other disciplines) can help to assess and improve existing or novel approaches in RE. 

Building on the success of seven workshop editions in the period of 2011-2023, the goal of the proposed 9th edition of EmpiRE is to shape the next phase of cross-fertilization of RE, SoS, and ESE, specifically: (i) to open up the interdisciplinary debate on the steadily moving frontiers in empirical RE, and (ii) to extend the network of RE, SoS and ESE researchers designing and conducting empirical studies in RE, which in turn will lead to the cross-fertilization between RE, SoS, and ESE. 

The targeted outcomes of this workshop include the identification of open research problems and the possible solutions to these problems, regarding:

• Application of empirical researches to RE methods, processes and tools in particular in domains like, e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Machine and Deep Learning, Recommender Systems, and Natural Language Processing;

• Evaluation and comparison of RE methods, processes and tools in context;

• Emerging research methods;

• New and unexpected forms of collaboration with industrial partners in empirical research projects;

• Evaluation of transferability of empirical results to practice.

EmpiRE 2024 is aligned with the central theme of the RE'24 conference, namely Exploring New Horizons: Expanding the Frontiers of Requirements Engineering. The targeted outcomes of this workshop include therefore the identification of open research problems of interdisciplinary nature and the possible solutions to these problems, regarding:

• Application of RE methods, processes and tools in new domains, e.g., Artificial Intelligence, Machine and Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, Large Language, Models, Mining Repositories and Recommender Systems;

• Emerging research methods and the ethical aspects of their use in context, e.g. ethical aspects of using generative AI for empirical RE research, exploiting freely available crowdsourced data;

• New and unexpected forms of collaboration within dustrial partners in empirical research projects;

• Evaluation and comparison of RE methods, processes and tools in context;

• Validating requirements and solution proposals that are grounded on Large Language Models.

• Evaluation of transferability of empirical results to practice. 

• Proposals of new problems in RE that would benefit from empirical research.