Guest Editorial: Special Section on Requirements Engineering for Services—Challenges and Practices

Since the first IEEE International Requirements Engineering for Services (REFS) workshop took place in the historical capital of China, Beijing, on 23 July 2007, three editions of the workshop have been running as a series at the COMPSAC conference, serving as an interactive forum for in-depth discussion of all issues related to requirements engineering for services. Researchers from the diverse areas of requirements engineering, services engineering, and services management presented and debated major issues, challenges, trends, and technical advances in requirements engineering for services. Based upon the ranking of papers assigned by the program committee in the workshops, a collection of six research papers from the workshop, together with two main conference papers on relevant topics, were invited to submit a revised and extended version to the IEEE Transations on Services Computing (TSC). Of these, two papers are included in this first special section on REFS.