REFSQ 2012 » Empirical Track

Empirical Track

Download CFP REFSQ 2012 Empirical Track
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The discussion at recent REFSQs have confirmed the strong need for empirical validation of the effectiveness for our RE methods by case studies and experiments, but the literature to date, including that of the REFSQ series, could show more of this validation. This lack is assumed to be at least partly due to the difficulties of

bringing academics and practitioners together to pursue empirical studies and
finding and persuading the participation of a sufficient number of suitable subjects for experiments.

Therefore, REFSQ 2012 will offer two events in its empirical track:

Empirical Fair (EF): Practitioners can propose studies that their organizations would like to have conducted, and researchers can propose studies that they would like to conduct in industry. The EF is a meeting point to match the demand and supply of empirical studies among researchers and practitioners.
Empirical Studies at REFSQ (ESR): Practitioners and academics will be given the opportunity to conduct a small number of empirical studies during REFSQ 2012 itself. The goals of this opportunity, besides that of permitting the conduct of some studies, are to raise awareness for the necessity and benefits of empirical studies and to show that participating in them is not dangerous to one’s health.

Each activity is designed to bring together the community of researchers and practitioners who are interested in empirical studies. Therefore, we call for submissions of proposals for the EF and the ESR. Possibilities include but are not restricted to

Academic EF study: an empirical study that a researcher would like to conduct in an industrial setting,
Practitioner EF study: an empirical study that a practitioner would like to have conducted in his or her organisation together with a researcher; the researcher would set up and conduct the study in the practitioner’s context,
Alive ESR study: a controlled experiment, requiring no more than 90 minutes, that involves all REFSQ participants who want to participate, and
Online questionnaire: an online questionnaire (survey), designed to require no more than 30 minutes, that is promoted at REFSQ and that can be filled out by all interested REFSQ participants, in their spare time at the conference.

A proposed alive ESR study or online questionnaire should be designed to be performed during the conference itself with REFSQ participants from industry and academia volunteering to be subjects. It is beneficial if a draft analysis of the ESR study or online questionnaire can be presented at the end of the conference. The final results of the study must be determinable within one month after the conference! Please consider in your proposal that REFSQ participants will have highly heterogeneous backgrounds.

Submission and evaluation of proposals for alive ESR studies and online questionnaires

Each proposal is limited to 4 pages in LNCS format containing the following information for the proposed study:

the title of the proposal,
the type (experiment or online questionnaire),
goals, including the hypothesis,
a detailed description of the intended procedure: preparation, conduction & analysis,
the benefits of results for the community,
the benefits to the subjects of participating in the study, including incentives,
the minimum and maximum number of subjects,
a description or profile of the intended subjects: prerequisites for being a subject, such as experience, background, etc.,
a short discussion of the threats to validity that might originate from the constraints of performing the study at REFSQ
the name, organisation, and contact details of proposal submitters,
a record of past empirical studies performed so far by the submitters,
venues for publicizing the study to attract participants in case your study is selected: websites, mailing lists, etc.; equipment and infrastructure needed for performing the experiment: PCs, software, flipcharts, Internet, etc.

We encourage proposals from both academia and industry! Submit your proposal to <joerg.doerr@iese.fraunhofer.de>.

Each proposal will be evaluated by the program committee based on the following criteria:

the likelihood of persuading participation of enough subjects with the study prerequisites,
the benefits of the expected results to the RE community,
the quality of the proposal’s description of the study procedure,
the experience of the submitters in conducting empirical studies.

If a positively evaluated proposed alive ESR study is not feasible because it requires more time than is available at REFSQ, its proposal will be forwarded for consideration for the EF. The results of the study will be made available by the end of April 2012 on the REFSQ 2012 homepage. A description of the results might be published in the proceedings of next REFSQ conference, REFSQ 2013.

Submission and evaluation of proposals for EF studies

Each proposal is limited to 1 page in LNCS format containing the following information for the proposed study:

Header: title of the proposal; author names, organization or institution name; contact address, including e-mail address,
Introduction: the problem to be solved or situation to be studied and why is it important,
Wanted from Industry if you are a researcher: the kind of industry project, process, data, artefacts, personnel, environment, etc. you looking for in the study you want to conduct,
Wanted from researchers if you are a practitioner: what kind of study should be set up by the researchers? What kind of data, project, artefacts, environment, etc. can your organisation provide to the researchers? Is there any particular kind of background expertise you are looking for from the researchers, e.g., method expertise like metrics, process, systems engineering and domain expertise like telecom, avionics, etc.?

During REFSQ 2012, we will organize an ESR poster session in which the selected people from industry and academia will exhibit their empirical study proposals. Each positively evaluated proposal will then be given a chance to be presented in the poster session. Submit your proposal to <joerg.doerr@iese.fraunhofer.de>.

Important dates

Submission Deadline extended	24th of January, 2012 (23:59 GMT)
Notification Date	10 February, 2012 (23:59 GMT)
Conference	19-22 March, 2012

Event co-chairs

Joerg Doerr, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Norbert Seyff, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Daniel M. Berry, University of Waterloo, Canada

Program Committee

Ian Alexander, Scenario Plus, UK
Claudia P. Ayala, Technical University of Catalunya, Spain
Brian Berenbach, Siemens AG, USA
Maya Daneva, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Deepak Dhungana, Siemens AG, Austria
Christof Ebert, Vector, Germany
Samuel Fricker, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
Thomas Gehrke, Siemens Rail Automation, Germany
Martin Herget, Siemens Corporate Technology, Germany
Andrea Herrmann, Infoman AG, Germany
Frank Houdek, Daimler AG, Germany
James Hulgan, Seilevel Inc, USA
Andreas Jedlitschka, Fraunhofer IESE, Germany
Natalia Juristo, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain
Søren Lauesen, IT-University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Nazim H. Madhavji, University of Western Ontario, Canada
Luisa Mich, University of Trento, Italy
Anne Persson, University of Skövde, Sweden
Gil Regev, EPFL and Itecor, Switzerland
Björn Regnell, Lund University, Sweden
Mehrdad Sabetzadeh, Simula Research Laboratory, Norway
Victoria Sakhnini, University of Waterloo, Canada
Camille Salinesi, Univ. Paris 1 – Panthéon Sorbonne, France
Erik Simmons, Intel, USA
Karen Smiley, ABB Corporation, USA
Roel Wieringa, University of Twente, Netherlands