Guest editorial: 10th anniversary workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ’2004)

For the tenth time, the international workshop Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) gathered researchers from around the world. The tenth anniversary was celebrated in the beautiful city of Riga, Latvia on the 6th and 7th of June, 2004, in connection with the International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’2004). The anniversary workshop had 27 participants from both academia and industry representing 15 countries from four continents. The REFSQ workshop series provides an annual, highly interactive forum for ground-breaking research in RE. The original aim of REFSQ was to foster research in requirements engineering with special focus on its links to the overall quality of the resulting systems. Over the years, the scope of the workshop has grown, both encompassing different and more diverse type of ‘‘systems’’ (from the initial software systems to business processes and socio-technical systems), and extending to other issues not necessarily focused on quality. The format of the workshop, with its strong emphasis on multifaceted, in depth discussions among participants over papers presented, has been highly successful in promoting active involvement and encouraging the emergence of innovative ideas. REFSQ invites publication and dialog regarding new solutions to known RE issues, ideas that are likely to initiate new threads inRE research, industrial problem statements, and generalisations from industrial experiences. The workshop also aims at intensive interaction between its participants and provokes discussion by guiding presentations, individual paper discussions, as well as topic discussions at the end of each session. This year, in addition to standard presentations, two special sessions devoted to a set of invited ‘‘anniversary papers’’ were included in the program: the first one on quality issues in RE and their relevance in industry; the second one on retrospective studies on the research output of REFSQ since its inception—as well as an outlook on future research. The REFSQ’2004 Call for Papers invited submissions on a wide range of RE issues, such as: understanding and improving RE-processes; new methods and method engineering approaches for RE; evaluations of RE methods, techniques and tools; empirical studies of industrial RE practice; as well as transdisciplinary theories of and paradigms for RE. This special issue includes four extended, revised and rigorously re-reviewed papers selected among those presented at REFSQ’04 (original versions are available in the workshop proceedings [1]). The selected best papers cover topics including the role of requirements in negotiation processes and the generation of requirements through novel elicitation techniques. A wide range of interesting results and important directions of further research are provided. Finally a summary of the anniversary events at REFSQ’04 (the anniversary papers can be downloaded from http://www.refsq.org) with focus on retrospectives and outlooks on RE research, and a summary of the best papers included in this special issue are provided.