The CrowdRE workshop: Central to progressing Crowd-based Requirements Engineering

Consider submitting your original research by 5 July 2019, or attend the workshop on 23 or 24 September 2019 on Jeju Island, South Korea! Open to all researchers and practitioners interested in the topic of CrowdRE, CrowdRE’19 will facilitate interactive discussions to foster inspiring ways to move forward. See the website for details: crowdre.github.io

For developers of a (software) product, online distribution channels have made it far easier to attract thousands, even millions, of users. But how can they make sure they know what this big ‘crowd’ of users wants or expects of their product, or what problems they encounter? If they use traditional means of requirements engineering (RE), they quickly realize that the amount of information available soon becomes unmanageable.

CrowdRE as the solution

In response to this problem, Fraunhofer IESE has been at the forefront of research and application in the field of Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE for short) for more than five years. This approach derives requirements from user feedback, such as texts or log data, while motivating users to provide this feedback. The approach involves many details that need to be researched or refined, which calls for researchers to collaborate across many research institutions. A crucial platform for them to connect with others and get inspired is the biannual “International Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering” or “CrowdRE Workshop”.

The CrowdRE’19 workshop

This summer, the third CrowdRE Workshop will be held on Jeju Island, South Korea. By now, the field of CrowdRE has matured to a point where the focus is on the transfer from CrowdRE research into industry practice. This includes presenting case studies, identifying and addressing hurdles associated with this process, identifying CrowdRE’s potentials and limits from lessons learned, and correctly integrating CrowdRE within the software product lifecycle. Another goal is to boost creativity and promote diversity within a large crowd of users, for example by adapting methods such as design thinking for settings with mostly remote crowd interactions.

History of the CrowdRE workshop

Previous editions of the CrowdRE workshop have had a tremendous impact on this domain. The first workshop, CrowdRE’15, united the distributed efforts on CrowdRE, facilitating more systematic research efforts in the following years and leading to a joint vision presented in the IEEE Software paper “The crowd in requirements engineering: The landscape and challenges”. The second workshop, CrowdRE’17, explored user motivation in more depth and resulted in a roadmap for CrowdRE, with greater emphasis on shared resources. In 2018, CrowdRE was the special focal topic of the Artificial Intelligence for Requirements Engineering workshop (AIRE’18), which strengthened the relationship between CrowdRE and the use of artificial intelligence.

Workshop organizers

As with previous editions of the workshop, Fraunhofer IESE plays an important part in organizing the workshop. The four co-organizers are Eduard C. “Eddy” Groen of Fraunhofer IESE, Meira Levy of Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Anas “Nash” Mahmoud of Louisiana State University, and Norbert Seyff of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.

 

UPDATE: Program

The following table lists the six accepted submissions to our workshop. Our full program will be announced early August 2019.