Welcome from the Workshop Chairs

Over the last decade, the Information Technology industry has become ever more interested in evaluating Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches, techniques and tools and comparing their usefulness, effectiveness and utility in specific practical contexts. The increasing interest in empirical evaluation resulted in a growing number of industry-university collaborations in the RE community, that have been instrumental to generating empirical data through experiments, surveys, case studies, and action research studies. As empirical studies are recognized as indispensable and valuable ways to assess the actual benefits and cost of applying the RE methods and tools proposed in the RE community, the conversation on adopting systematic research methods and evaluation practices intensified. The overall objective of the EmpiRE workshop series at the annual RE conference is to increase the cross-fertilization of Empirical Software Engineering (ESE) methods and RE by actively encouraging the exchange of knowledge and ideas between the communities of ESE and RE. Since its launch at RE’11 in Trento, the EmpiRE workshop has been serving as the platform promoting the use of new evaluation techniques from ESE in the area of RE as well as the discussion on new domains and problems in RE where involving ESE will make a great difference. Some outcomes of the past editions of EmpiRE include the identification of open research problems and the possible solutions to these problems regarding: (i) the aspects of RE approaches that can be evaluated; (ii) the factors, criteria, and metrics that are appropriate for empirical evaluation purposes; (iii) the replication of empirical RE studies; (iv) the role of the users’ perspectives in empirical RE.