1  The IEEE RE 2023 conference

The IEEE International Requirements Engineering (RE) Conference is the premier venue for requirements engineering researchers, practitioners, students, and educators to meet and to discuss the most recent innovations, trends, experiences, and issues.

The 31st edition of the conference (RE 2023) welcomed original papers focusing on traditional RE topics. Furthermore, we especially solicited submissions on the theme: “Redefining RE: Challenging RE Perceptions, Boundaries, and Topics”. We asked the RE community to challenge their notion of what is and is not included as part of requirements engineering, and how these boundaries affect successful buy-in and application of RE research in industry. With this theme, we encouraged submissions to a) challenge the boundaries of requirements engineering, e.g., due to the rise in AI, machine learning, cyber-physical systems; and b) propose new theories, topics and methods, or a revision of existing RE topics: these may be needed to address the changing landscape of software and systems development.

RE’23 was organized by Kurt Schneider (general chair) and Oliver Karras (local organization chair) at Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. This was the first full in-person edition of the conference after the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 250 attendees from all over the world participated. RE’23 hosted two excellent keynotes (Claes Wohlin and Rainer Dammers), featured seven tracks with paper or artifact submissions, hosted 13 workshops, a doctoral symposium, and six tutorials.

In the Research and Industry Tracks, 25 papers were presented. They were accepted in a double-blind review process by both program committees composed by distinguished members of the research community. The best six papers were invited to submit extended versions to this Special Issue. All completed the process successfully. The journal versions in this Special Issue extend the invited papers with at least 40% of new contribution.

2 In this special issue

What you see is what you trace: a two-stage interview study on traceability practices and eye tracking potential by Maike Ahrens, Lukas Nagel, and Kurt Schneider—This paper reports on a two-stage interview study with industry practitioners, where the authors first examine tracing practices and the potential for eye tracking, and they then identify role-specific workflows in a project to determine activities where gaze data could be used to assist in the automatic establishment of trace links.

A splash of color: a dual dive into the effects of EVO on decision-making with goal models by Yesugen Baatartogtokh, Irene Foster, and Alicia M. Grubb—In the context of approaches that assist in making early trade-off decisions for software projects, the authors investigate how the use of color affects the ability of inexperienced modelers to obtain a better understanding of goal models that focus on evolution (the so-called EVO approach to goal modeling).

Enhancing the requirements engineering of configurable systems by the ongoing use of variability models by Chin Khor and Robyn R. Lutz—This paper is positioned in the context of software product lines, wherein the authors study the problem of checking for missing and inconsistent features and constraints within a feature model. The proposed approach extends traditional techniques for variability management by using techniques borrowed from combinatorial interaction testing.

Modelling the quantification of requirements technical debt by Judith Perera, Ewan Tempero, Yu-Cheng Tu and Kelly Blincoe—The authors propose a conceptual model called Requirements Technical Debt Quantification Model (RTDQM) that can be used to facilitate the understanding about requirements-related technical debt. RTDQM is used to compare and analyze alternative approaches, or to develop new approaches, for quantifying requirements technical debt.

Recommending and release planning of user-driven functionality deletion for mobile apps by Maleknaz Nayebi, Konstantin Kuznetsov, Andreas Zeller and Guenther Ruhe—This paper starts from the premise that, especially in the context of mobile apps, excess of functionality can impact software qualities like usability, maintainability and resource consumption. In this context, they propose the Radiation approach that processes user feedback to recommend features that could potentially be deleted from an app.

Benchmarking requirement template systems: comparing appropriateness, usability, and expressiveness by Katharina Großer, Amir Shayan Ahmadian, Marina Rukavitsyna, Qusai Ramadan and Jan Jürjens—The authors of this paper focus on evaluating requirements templates; in particular, they conduct comparative experiments with five template systems to identify similarities and differences. The experimental results indicate that some templates deliver higher completeness, and that templates generally lead to better requirements than free text.