User:Tancos37/REFSQ

The International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ) is a conference that focuses on the field of requirements engineering (RE) and software quality. The conference, permanently based in Europe, is held annually and attracts researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government who are interested in the latest advances and best practices in these fields.

Structure
The goals of REFSQ are to advance Requirements Engineering (RE) knowledge by providing a forum for researchers and practitioners to expose their work to the RE community, through active and open discussions that are stimulated by paper presentations and by publishing of proceedings in a readily-accessible form by a recognised publisher of computer science.

REFSQ seeks contributions which report on novel ideas and techniques that enhance the quality of RE’s products and processes, as well as reflections on current research. The conference has a long tradition of being a highly structured and interactive forum. In addition to the scientific program, REFSQ also features an interactive Industry Track, Workshops, Posters and Tool demos, Doctoral Symposium and a Journal First Track.

History
The first REFSQ ‘94 workshop was held in conjunction with the CAiSE ‘94 Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering in Utrecht, The Netherlands on June 6th and 7th 1994. The founding organizers were Gernot Starke, Klaus Pohl and Peter Peters. The workshop themes were covered in three sessions: Non-functional requirements, Requirements traceability and Structuring requirements engineering.

In 2006, after eleven editions of being organized as a workshop in conjunction with CAiSE, REFSQ was held as a working conference for the first time. This came along with changes to the format, such as attendance to REFSQ being opened to non-authors, the program being extended, including a panel session and a special “greenhouse” category for papers describing maturing research, and special effort was made to invite industrial papers and attendants.

Starting in a 1999, a tradition was established that each edition of REFSQ should highlight a "Special a Theme", inviting with particular emphasis papers on that specific theme.

Organization
REFSQ is governed and organised by the Steering Committee (SC), which delegates the responsibilities for the scientific program to the Program Chairs of each edition. Other components of the Steering Committee are Industry Program Chairs, Local Organisations and Background Organisations.

The SC Chair and Vice-Chair solicit bids for future REFSQ locations, including local and/or background organizations. The SC Chair and Vice-Chair present the elicited proposal(s) to the SC. The decision is made by an explicit vote by the SC.

The location for REFSQ instances is chosen by the SC after the Chair and Vice-Chair present the proposals within Europe. It should be at least two instances of REFSQ in advance in order to allow fixing the contracts with hotels etc.

Current Steering Committee Membership
There are currently 12 SC members, of which the two chairs are Anna Perini (Program Chair 2017, SC Vice Chair 2020-2021, and SC Chair 2022-2024, expires 2025), and Fabiano Dalpiaz (Program Chair 2021 and SC Vice-Chair 2021-2024, expires 2025).

Ratings
The conference has a 'B' rating from the Australian Ranking of ICT Conferences and a 'B3' rating from the Brazilian ministry of education.

List of Conferences
Past and future REFSQ conferences include :

Best paper award
The conferences always feature an award for the best paper. The papers are reviewed by at least three members of the Program Committee.