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The rise of mobile, social and cloud apps poses new challenges and opportunities to the field of requirements engineering (RE). Traditional RE techniques have difficulties scaling up to settings with a ‘crowd’ of thousands up to millions of users of a (software) product. The crowd is an interesting source for RE because it produces user feedback in texts and usage data. Being able to respond quickly, effectively and iteratively to the requirements, problems, wishes and needs identified in user feedback can increase a product’s success. Crowd-Based RE (CrowdRE) seeks to provide RE with suitable means for this crowd paradigm.
The Third Workshop on Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE’19) builds on the successes of its previous editions, which unified the visions into a coherent RE approach (CrowdRE’15), established a roadmap and shared resources (CrowdRE’17), and strengthened relationships to artificial intelligence techniques (CrowdRE as special focal topic of AIRE’18).

Important Dates

• 5 9 July 2019: Extended Paper Submission
• 25 July 2019: Paper Notification
• 8 August 2019: Camera Ready Due
• 24 September: Workshop

Paper Submission and Selection Process

We welcome original submissions from research and practice through EasyChair:  https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=crowdre2019 The papers should be in one of the following categories:

• Technical solution papers providing research results with an early validation, which may include tool showcases (4–6 pages + 1 page for references)
• Experience reports that give insights in existing RE practice and potential for application in settings that involve a crowd (4–6 pages + 1 page for references)
• Problem statements explaining industry problems in settings with a large group of stakeholders (2–3 pages)
• Vision statements explaining strongly explorative ideas, especially towards technology transfer into practice (2–3 pages)

See the workshop website for additional requirements for submissions. Each submission will be reviewed by three reviewers. All accepted papers will be published in the joint RE 2019 workshop proceedings.

Workshop Details

Key Questions & Themes of Interest

CrowdRE will mainly focus on the following key questions:

• What are the achievements and contributions of CrowdRE approaches thus far? How do they contribute to improving RE?
• What are the risks of going beyond the borders of the 'brown field' domain of RE?
• How can CrowdRE be applied in industry settings? In which parts of the software development lifecycle can CrowdRE play a vital role? Which parts are less suited, and why?
• What are the central application domains for a CrowdRE approach? What are typical Use Cases in which CrowdRE is applied?
• How can a holistic solution be provided for a practical application of CrowdRE?
• How can data from a large group of stakeholders be obtained and interpreted? How can ambiguity and subjectivity be mitigated?
• How can the reliability of individual crowd members and of the data in general be determined?
• In what way can crowd members be motivated to contribute the user feedback we require of them?
• Assuming that the stakeholders form a crowd, how are requirements best elicited, documented, validated, negotiated and managed? How are data from the crowd best obtained and interpreted?
• In what way could techniques from Big Data analytics be leveraged to analyze heterogeneous and large datasets as a new source for new/changed requirements?
• What are common denominators of existing and emerging approaches to make RE more suitable for CrowdRE? How can these approaches complement one another? What are the gaps that have not yet been covered by these solutions?
• Where do the opportunities to collaborate lie? To what extent can the various fields of work be integrated, and where will approaches remain different?

Workshop Topics

The following themes of interest for paper submission include, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Crowd-based Requirements Engineering (CrowdRE)
• Analysis of user feedback for RE using Big Data
• Natural language processing, Information Retrieval, (supervised and unsupervised) Machine Learning, ontologies
• Crowd-based monitoring and usage mining approaches
• Case studies and Use Cases involving CrowdRE
• The contribution of CrowdRE to prioritization, software adaptation, testing and other software engineering aspects
• The intersection of RE and domains such as sociology, psychology, human factors, and anthropology
• Approaches to motivate, steer, and boost creativity in the crowd
• Approaches to understand, typify, diversify and engage a crowd for RE
• Automated RE and the role of the requirements engineer
• Automated RE and data (safeguarding rollback, privacy, traceability and data integrity; measuring validity, reliability, source quality; processing of rejected data)
• Platforms and tools supporting CrowdRE

Past Editions of the Workshop

• CrowdRE as special focal topic of AIRE 2018: aire18.aset.tu-berlin.de
• CrowdRE 2017 at RE'17: crowdre.github.io/ws-2017
• CrowdRE 2015 at RE'15: sse.uni-due.de/crowdre15

Committees

CrowdRE'19 Program Committee

• Nirav Ajmeri, North Carolina State University (USA)
• Raian Ali, Bournemouth University (UK)
• Travis D. Breaux, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
• Sjaak Brinkkemper, Utrecht University (Netherlands)
• Fabiano Dalpiaz, Utrecht University (Netherlands)
• Joerg Doerr, Fraunhofer IESE (Germany)
• Xavier Franch, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
• Vicenzo Gervasi, University of Pisa (Italy)
• Emitzá Guzmán, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
• Mahmood Hosseini, JP Morgan (UK)
• Marjo Kauppinen, Aalto University (Finland)
• Fitsum M. Kifetew, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy)
• Eric Knauss, University of Gothenburg (Sweden)
• Soo Ling Lim, University College London (UK)
• Itzel Morales Ramírez, Infotec (Mexico)
• Pradeep K. Murukannaiah, Rochester Institute of Technology (USA)
• Marc Oriol, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain)
• Anna Perini, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Italy)
• Kurt Schneider, Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany)

Organizing committee

• Eduard C. Groen, Fraunhofer IESE (Germany)
• Meira Levy, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art (Israel)
• Anas Mahmoud, Louisiana State University (USA)
• Norbert Seyff, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (Switzerland)

Contact

All questions about the workshop should be emailed to the organizers. You can find their email addresses at crowdre.github.io/ws-2019/committees.html