About

The 31st International Working Conference on Requirement Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality will again host a track for discussing in progress journal manuscripts, inspired by journal-first tracks of other conferences, but focused on works in progress.

In the spirit of REFSQ, which is a working conference, this track will not include already-published papers, but will instead allow authors to submit, and, if accepted in the track, present and discuss their almost-ready, just submitted, or just-rejected journal of conference papers, and thus gather input from the community on their work and, if available, the comments they have received from the reviewers.

This track will be beneficial for both the authors, who will receive feedback for improving their manuscript, and the REFSQ community, who will be able to have sneak peeks at new exciting research and support researchers in improving them.

Call for Papers

The Journal Early Feedback track at REFSQ’25 welcomes submissions of almost-ready and recently rejected papers (from journals or conferences, including REFSQ) that address the topics related to requirements engineering.

Some examples of authors that should consider submitting to this track are:

• Junior researchers at their first experience as the leading author of a journal paper;
• Researchers who usually publish in non-requirements engineering venues and who are now approaching requirements engineering topics for the first time;
• Authors of rejected journal papers who are not fully convinced of the critiques they received or would require a sounding board for strategies to improve their papers;
• Authors of papers recently submitted for the first time and looking for early feedback.

A submission to the REFSQ’25 Journal Early Feedback track should include:

• A one-page proposal consisting of:
  • Paper’s title.
  • Author names.
  • Abstract.
  • Optional: The name of the journal they are planning to submit to.
  • List of topics/questions they want to discuss regarding the paper.
  • The manuscript in its current status.
  • If available and relevant, the reviewers’ comments that the authors are planning to discuss.

Important Dates

• February 7th, 2025: Submission of proposal, manuscript, and (optionally) existing comments. Submission Link
• February 27th, 2025: Decision about inclusion in the Journal Early Feedback track.

Selection Criteria

Submissions will be evaluated considering:

• The relevance of the topic of the work
• The maturity of the draft paper
• The possibility of a fruitful and beneficial discussion involving the REFSQ community.

Presentation

Authors of accepted submissions will be invited to present and discuss their work at the conference.

Presentations of accepted submissions should be 10 minutes long, followed by a period for questions and answers of 10 minutes (led by a discussant), for a total of 20 minutes.

Please note there will not be anything published for this track in the REFSQ’25 proceedings.