Philanthropic conference-based requirements engineering in time of pandemic and beyond

Meira Levy; Irit Hadar; Jennifer Horkoff; Jane Huffman Hayes; Barbara Paech; Alex Dekhtyar; Gunter Mussbacher; Elda Paja; Tong Li; Seok-Won Lee; Dongfeng Fang

doi:10.1007/s00766-022-00386-4

Philanthropic conference-based requirements engineering in time of pandemic and beyond

Requir Eng. 2023;28(2):213-227. doi: 10.1007/s00766-022-00386-4. Epub 2022 Sep 10.

Authors

Meira Levy^{1

2}, Irit Hadar², Jennifer Horkoff³, Jane Huffman Hayes⁴, Barbara Paech⁵, Alex Dekhtyar⁶, Gunter Mussbacher⁷, Elda Paja⁸, Tong Li⁹, Seok-Won Lee¹⁰, Dongfeng Fang⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Industrial Engineering and Management, Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, Ramat Gan, Israel.
² Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel.
³ University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden.
⁴ Computer Science Department, University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA.
⁵ Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany.
⁶ CSSE Department, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, USA.
⁷ McGill University, Montreal, Canada.
⁸ Computer Science Department, IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
⁹ Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China.
¹⁰ Information and Computer Engineering, Ajou University, Suwon, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

As software engineering (SE) practitioners, we can help society by using our communities of experts to address a software need of a socially conscious organization. Doing so can benefit society in the locale of a SE conference and provide access to international experts for local organizations. Furthermore, established SE researchers as well as practitioners and students have the opportunity for a unique learning experience. While the SE community has already realized the importance of addressing human values and promoting social good objectives in software development, we are unaware of previous attempts to leverage SE conferences for this activity. Conferences present an opportunity to enjoy the assembly of SE practitioners, researchers, and students for the purpose of a philanthropic endeavor. Over the past four years of running a "Requirements Engineering for Social Good" event called RE Cares, co-located with the International Conference on Requirements Engineering, we worked with the stakeholders local to the conference venue. We selected stakeholders who would not necessarily have ready access to requirements engineering, software design, and development expertise otherwise, to build software targeting "good causes." In the last two years, this event was altered to adapt to the constraints induced by COVID-19, moving to a hybrid mode and changing many of its practices accordingly. This paper summarizes and generalizes our experiences, discussing our lessons learned in the context of the pandemic and beyond and providing a framework for conducting similar social contribution in any SE conferences in general.

Keywords: COVID-19; Hybrid events; Pandemic; Philanthropic projects; Requirements engineering; Stakeholders.

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