Which human values are important for us as requirements engineers and requirements engineering researchers? Do we know about our values? Which customers do we have and what are their values? How do all these values influence each other? In this talk I will reflect on these questions and give examples based on roughly 30 years of experience. Furthermore, I will provide my view on how human values can shape future requirements engineering practice and research.

Barbara Paech holds the chair "Software Engineering“ at Heidelberg University, Germany. Her teaching and research focuses on methods and processes to ensure quality of software with adequate effort. Since many years, she is particularly active in the area of requirements and rational engineering focusing on the humans involved. Based on her experiences as department head at the Fraunhofer Institute Experimental Software Engineering her research is often empirical and in close cooperation with industry. She has headed several industrial, national and international research and transfer projects and has served several functions (including invited talks, program co-chair, steering committee member) at well-known requirements-engineering events such as RE or REFSQ. She is founding member of the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB) and member of the Computer Science review board of the German National Research Funding Society (DFG). She was spokeswoman of the section “Software Engineering” in the German computer science society and has headed the advisory board of study affairs of the representation of German Computer Science study programs “Fakultätentag Informatik”.

She holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München and a Habilitation in Computer Science from the Technical Universität München.