An effective technique to support sustainable learning is distributed practice, a method shown to enhance long-term knowledge retention. As part of our research agenda, we aim to investigate suitable design strategies for eLearning courses that support distributed practice through intrinsic motivation. Our most recent strategy followed the idea of linking the acquisition of badges gained by completing a set of quizzes with a small extrinsic reward, a small bonus in the exam grade. We built a course with quizzes and timed badges with staged deadlines for the badges to ensure students do the quizzes during the semester and not shortly before the exam. An initial evaluation of this course design yielded encouraging results. The assessment showed that students learned a great deal from the quizzes and were highly motivated by the quizzes and by receiving the badges. Qualitative feedback highlighted increased motivation, increased engagement, and lower levels of perceived stress among students, who attributed these changes to the platform's ability to make learning more enjoyable and less monotonous. This paper argues that the strategic use of gamification in engineering education can significantly support distributed practice by creating an interactive, motivating, and supportive learning environment.

Misalignments between stakeholders' project visions can lead to the elicitation of conflicting requirements. When these conflicts remain undetected, they can necessitate costly changes in late stages of the development process. One approach to avoid such conflicts are so-called vision videos. Vision videos present the project vision held by the stakeholders that create the vision videos. By watching a video created by their peers, stakeholders can detect and resolve misalignments between their project vision and the one presented in the video. Thus far, research has focused on how to create vision videos. Research on how to watch and use a vision video for requirements validation has been limited. If vision videos are created with care, but used without consideration, their full potential may be lost. In this paper, we aim to lay the groundwork for future research on the usage of vision videos by conducting an exploratory study with 128 students working in 21 project teams. Each team used vision videos to align their project vision with those of their customers. Based on this study, we identify 5 possible research avenues and present corresponding research questions. In doing so, we pave the way towards an effective usage of vision videos.

Software engineering projects are highly collaborative. They require interdisciplinary teams to cooperate and exchange information efficiently and effectively to successfully achieve their project goals within time and budget. In this collaborative context, the communication of requirements plays an important role in enabling all team members to accomplish their engineering activities. However, establishing a shared understanding of the requirements is challenging. In this perspective paper, we reflect on such challenges, which we experienced in an ongoing software development project, and propose novel approaches that seem promising for tackling the identified challenges. These ideas stem from best practices of non- SE disciplines such as criminology, film studies & dramatics, journalism & authoring, and psychology. Moreover, we outline our future research agenda, which comprises research questions and activities that aim to further elaborate on the envisioned ideas and to apply, respectively evaluate, their effect on improving requirements communication. This research agenda is intended to motivate the RE community to contribute to our research activities and to encourage both practitioners and researchers to get inspired by other disciplines as this is surely beneficial when it comes to addressing current challenges.

Our requirements engineering (RE) community has known for decades that the success or failure of RE methods heavily depends on the context in which they are applied. Thus, many experiences have been gained and shared in the community that reflect which RE methods are suitable for a specific context, such as embedded systems development (e.g., automotive or military domain) or information systems development (e.g., banking or flight control domain). Nowadays, in times of smart cities and their counterpart smart rural areas, where newly introduced IT systems have a strong effect on our society, a new and challenging context arises for RE, which opens up new research questions. As a contribution to this situation and to foster discussions in our community about whether our RE methods are appropriate in this new "social context", this perspective paper reflects on the state of the art and on our own experiences in applying RE in the context of smart rural areas. These results might also pertain in the context of smart cities that pose similar challenges to RE. In addition, we present a framework comprising both an initial classification of social contexts, particularly their end users, and a classification for RE methods. Example usage scenarios illustrate how this framework helps to reflect on the suitability of our RE methods, and, if necessary, provides the basis for adapting them or creating new ones. Finally, we outline a roadmap with research questions and related activities with which we want to encourage our community to perform the proposed research activities in order to enrich our body of experiences and adapt our methods to this highly relevant context.

We are now living in the era of digital transformation: Innovative and digital business models are transforming the global business world and society. However, the authors of this paper have perceived barriers that prevent requirements engineers from contributing properly to the development of the software systems that underpin the digital transformation. We also realized that breaking down each of these barriers would contribute to requirements engineering (RE) becoming ubiquitous in certain dimensions: RE everywhere, with everyone, for everything, automated, accepting openness, and cross-domain. In this paper, we analyze each dimension of ubiquity in the scope of the interaction between requirements engineers and end users. In particular, we point out the transformation that is required to break down each barrier, present the perspective of the scientific community and our own practical perspective, and discuss our vision on how to achieve this dimension of ubiquity. Our goal is to raise the interest of the research community in providing approaches to address the barriers and move towards ubiquitous RE.

Requirements engineering (RE) is widely recognized as a crucial factor for the success of software projects. Therefore, companies often request assessments of RE processes and resulting artifacts to identify issues and improvement potential. However, industry claims that current assessment approaches do not always fulfill their needs regarding efficiency and effectiveness. Motivated by needs of both, companies asking for an assessment, and a company in the role of an assessor, we have developed a lightweight, tool-supported RE assessment approach. Apart from presenting the approach, we also discuss early experiences we gained from applying our assessment approach in real-world industrial projects.

It has been previously established that high cognitive load influences driving performance, but is the driver's perception of their experience while driving also influenced by cognitive load? To our knowledge, little evaluation has taken place regarding the investigation of such an effect of cognitive load on user experience, especially in the automotive domain. This paper introduces motivation and background of our current research on real-time monitoring of drivers' mental states aiming to explore the previously mentioned relations between mental states and UX in a driving simulator environment. Furthermore, the paper presents initial ideas of task designs that are targeted to elicit and induce mental states like cognitive load and selected user experience factors we consider being interesting in the automotive domain and that we aim to discuss with other researchers and practitioners in the workshop.

To support the early evaluation of the effects of a novel system on its environment, it is important to understand and analyze current deficits and problems within the application domain and to derive hypotheses on the potential impact of the system. An emerging application domain of such cause-effect oriented requirements engineering methods is the automotive domain. New upcoming functionalities in automobiles and traffic systems do not only require accurate development and consideration of safety-related aspects, but are also more and more constrained to proving their positive effect on existing traffic systems, ecological and sociological aspects, as well as, e.g., future reduction of the number of traffic deaths. Based on a systematic elicitation and refinement of system requirements, explicit measures can be derived to evaluate the achievement and coverage of envisioned system goals and to identify further optimization goals. In this paper, we will introduce a requirements engineering method and specification guideline that supports the deductive derivation and specification of measures from a causal chain of goals, deficits, hypotheses and solutions for evaluating a system's effect on its application environment. We already applied this approach in a research project in the automotive domain and will exemplarily describe the realization of a concrete vehicle function that interacts with the environment. At the end, we will provide a general conclusion regarding our first experiences with the described method and with the specification guideline.

Driver distraction is an important risk factor for road traffic injuries, and has been the focus of a number of empirical studies aiming to raise awareness about the risks of distracted driving and to promote countermeasures. While some of the recorded road incidents in these studies have their roots in distracting events (such as mobile phone usage) a large proportion of recorded road incidents can be attributed to more elusive driver inattention factors not linked to specific trigger events. These distraction categories are especially challenging and currently not in focus of current research as they are difficult to detect and address by suitable prognostic measures, in order to improve road safety. To contribute to this issue, this paper presents research into monitoring drivers' mental states in real-time, using objective measurements. We propose an iterative research methodology where specific mental states are elicited, user response captured experimentally, and interaction models built using advanced machine learning techniques. Behavioral measures such as speech, eye activity or posture, and physiological measures such as galvanic skin response or heart rate provide input features for the models. This driver-centric approach addresses the complex issue of driver inattention, and can help improve road safety through active monitoring of road users, customized decision support in the vehicle, and objective training feedback. Low-fidelity simulators we have built allowed us to roll out some preliminary tasks prompting encouraging feedback from subjects during informal testing.