REFSQ is Europe’s leading conference series on requirements engineering. Since 1994, It has been an important force in bringing together researchers and practitioners to advance the quality of software systems, services, and products.

REFSQ seeks contributions on novel ideas and techniques that enhance the quality of requirements engineering methodology, results, and outcomes, as well as reflections of current research and evaluation of research results.

As a working conference, REFSQ places interaction and fruitful discussion at its core. REFSQ 2027 will offer an extensive program for researchers and practitioners from industry and government.

The rapid emergence of AI-assisted coding tools is fundamentally transforming software development velocity, with developers completing implementation tasks significantly faster. This acceleration creates a critical challenge: requirements engineering processes must evolve to match the heightened velocity of implementation. When developers can translate requirements into code more rapidly, bottlenecks shift upstream to requirements elicitation, validation, and refinement. However, there are inherent limits to how much requirements engineering can accelerate, as the fundamental challenge of finding consensus between stakeholders with diverse perspectives and interests remains a human-centered activity that cannot be compressed indefinitely. The disconnect between accelerated coding and traditional RE practices creates risks of delivering the wrong functionality faster, accumulating technical debt, and losing alignment with stakeholder needs. REFSQ 2027 seeks to explore how requirements engineering must adapt to keep pace with AI-accelerated development while respecting the constraints of collaborative decision-making, ensuring that increased velocity translates into value rather than waste.

We welcome contributions that address, for instance:

• Empirical studies. Quantifying the impact of AI-assisted coding on requirements engineering cycles, including measurements of requirements volatility, validation delays, and alignment challenges in teams using AI coding assistants.
• Humans in the Loop. Human-AI collaboration in redefining RE, Value-based RE in AI-accelerated environments.
• Novel RE practices and methodologies accommodate accelerated development velocity, such as continuous requirements elicitation frameworks, AI-augmented validation techniques, or adaptive processes for high-frequency deployment environments.
• Industrial experience reports. Documenting how organizations adapt their requirements engineering practices to AI-accelerated development, including challenges encountered, solutions implemented, and lessons learned.
• Benchmarking, evaluation and dataset papers. Evaluation frameworks for “AI-speed” RE methods, datasets for AI-based RE tools.

Double-blind Review

New this year: REFSQ 2027 will adopt a double-blind review process. Authors should ensure that submissions are properly anonymized.

Paper Categories

We invite submissions along the following categories:

• Technical design papers (15 pages incl. references) describe the design of new artifacts, i.e., novel solutions for problems relevant to practice and/or significant and theoretically sound improvements of existing solutions. A preliminary validation of the artifacts is also expected.
• Scientific evaluation papers (15 pages incl. references) investigate existing real-world problems, evaluate existing artifacts implemented in real-world settings, or validate newly designed artifacts, e.g., by means such as case studies, action research, quasi-controlled experiments, simulations, surveys, or secondary studies if they clearly synthesize the state of reported evidence in literature (via systematic literature reviews or mapping studies). Please refer also to the ACM Sigsoft Empirical Standards for Software Engineering for guidelines and review criteria for each research method: https://github.com/acmsigsoft/EmpiricalStandards
• Experience report papers (12 pages incl. references) describe retrospective reports on experiences in applying RE techniques in practice, or addressing RE problems in real-world contexts. These papers focus on reporting the experience and give special attention to practical insights, lessons learned, and/or key takeaways and recommendations to the community. Experience reports may also include studies in which the authors interview practitioners about the application of specific RE techniques or about RE problems in practice.
• Vision papers (8 pages incl. references) state where research in the field should be heading.
• Research previews (8 pages incl. references) describe well-defined research ideas at an early stage of investigation which may not be fully developed. Each type of paper has its own review criteria, based on the description above. Finally, we cordially invite authors to disclose their research artifacts following our open science guidelines. Authors who wish to disclose their artifacts can find further guidance and support under the Open Science Policy.

Submission, Reviewing and Publication

Contributions must be submitted via Easychair. Submissions will open later this year.

Each submission in the scope of REFSQ will undergo a double-blind review process that will involve at least three members of the program committee. The REFSQ 2027 proceedings will be published in Springer’s LNCS series. Proceedings of previous editions can be found at https://link.springer.com/conference/refsq.

Formatting

All submissions must be formatted according to the Springer LNCS/LNBIP conference proceedings template for LaTeX and Word, available at https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines. As per the guidelines, please remember to include keywords after your abstract.

Furthermore, to support a clear and consistent understanding of submissions, each paper submitted to REFSQ 2027 is required to have an abstract structured with exactly 4 paragraphs with the following content:

• Context and motivation: situate and motivate your research.
• Question/problem: formulate the specific question/problem addressed by the paper.
• Principal ideas/results: summarize the ideas and results described in your paper. State, where appropriate, your research approach and methodology.
• Contribution: state the main contribution of your paper, by highlighting its added value (e.g., to theory, to practice). Also, state the limitations of your results.

Open Science Policy

As in previous years, REFSQ 2027 features a dedicated Open Science track. We encourage authors to make their research and artifacts more accessible, reproducible, and verifiable by adhering to the Open Science Policy (to be published). To ensure that the research and artifacts are more accessible and that the REFSQ 2027 Open Science Policy is followed, an explicit Data Availability Statement (similar to the acknowledgments) should be included at the end of each submitted paper. Specifically, authors should provide details about any material disclosed alongside their submission, such as data, code, or other relevant material or justify the reasons why disclosure is not possible (e.g., due to IP agreements).