Welcome from the Workshop Chairs

Welcome to the fifth International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2015) at RE’15! In the past few years, some important developments in the Information Technology Services marketplace as well as in the software industry in particular fueled the debate on the evaluation of Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches, techniques and tools and the comparison of their usefulness, effectiveness and utility in specific practical contexts. Examples of such market trends include, among many others, the increased interest in collaborative and just-in-time application of RE techniques and the use of software analytics techniques for mining requirements repositories.Also, existing RE technology is more and more being applied in the context of new areas, such as Internet of Things, software ecosystems, green and Cloud computing, to name a few. This increased interest in empirical evaluation is precipitating a growing number of industry-university collaborations in the RE community, which, in turn, is instrumental in generating empirical data through case studies, action research studies, experiments, and surveys. As empirical studies are recognized as invaluable for assessing the actual benefits and cost of applying the RE methods and tools proposed in the RE community, the conversation on adopting these and on evaluation practices intensifies even further.