Overview

Our economic productivity and well-being in every-day life strongly hinges on IT, and thus software quality. In most systems, quality is determined through the development process. With the spread of service-oriented and autonomic systems, software quality is continuously negotiated and adapted at run-time. Requirements Engineering (RE) sets the stage for quality, both at development- and run-time. In spite of the constant emergence of new technologies and developing paradigms, basic issues such as effective communication between stakeholders or correctness, consistency and completeness of large requirements documents are the dominant issues in industry.

Against this background, REFSQ'08 seeks reports of innovative work in RE that enhances the quality of software and systems, both when challenged by new development paradigms or technologies, but also when needed to establish proven RE practices in industry. We encourage researchers and practitioners from the RE, software engineering, information systems, and embedded systems fields to present original work. Contributions from cognate areas such as formal methods, systems engineering, human and computer interaction, economics and management and social sciences are very welcome for the insights they provide in RE.
Theme: Fitness of Requirements Engineering

We encourage submissions on any aspect of RE but we particularly welcome submissions that address how the fitness of the RE processes and products to the context can be assessed, established, improved and changed over time.

Examples of such contexts are the following:

* business and product strategies,
* quality goals (e.g., security),
* stakeholders (e.g., small or large companies, global or market-driven development),
* development methods (e.g., product-line-driven, model-driven development),
* development processes (e.g., agile),
* project management (e.g., offshoring, portfolio management),
* technology (e.g., service-oriented computing).

Case studies, experience reports and industrial problem statements are particularly encouraged.
Working conference format

REFSQ has a long tradition of being a highly structured and interactive forum and this remains for the working conference format. Attendance of REFSQ is not restricted to paper authors, but the number of participants will be restricted to encourage the active involvement of all attendees. The working language is English.
Submissions

Three types of papers are solicited:

* full papers (15 pages max, 12 recommended),
* position papers (6 pages max),
* industrial problem statements (6 pages max).

See instructions for authors for details about format and evaluation criteria.

Submission is handled electronically through the REFSQ web site.
Publication

The REFSQ'08 proceedings will be published by Springer as a special volume of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS).
Important Dates

Submission deadline: November 30th, 2007 December 7th, 2007 (2359 GMT) (extended)

Notification of acceptance: February 18th, 2008 February 1st, 2008 (changed)

REFSQ'08 in Montpellier: June 16th-17th, 2008

Venue

REFSQ'08 will take place in Montpellier, France, where it will be co-located with CAiSE'08.