  The relevance of Requirements Engineering (RE) research to practitioners is a
prerequisite for problem-driven research in the area and key for a long-term
dissemination of research results to everyday practice. To better understand
how industry practitioners perceive the practical relevance of RE research, we
have initiated the RE-Pract project, an international collaboration conducting
an empirical study. This project opts for a replication of previous work done
in two different domains and relies on survey research. To this end, we have
designed a survey to be sent to several hundred industry practitioners at
various companies around the world and ask them to rate their perceived
practical relevance of the research described in a sample of 418 RE papers
published between 2010 and 2015 at the RE, ICSE, FSE, ESEC/FSE, ESEM and REFSQ
conferences. In this paper, we summarise our research protocol and present the
current status of our study and the planned future steps.
