Time Aspects in Requirements Engineering: Or ‘Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining’

Nowadays, time is critical in most system engineering projects. The ability to deliver systems in short time determines the success of the system supplier. For customers, the quicker the system delivery time, the better are their chances to get some business advantages in their ever-changing business environments. As a consequence, an increasing number of projects are subjected to tight deadlines in all project phases, including requirements elicitation. A project with plenty of time for developing a requirements specification is hard to find. In this paper, experiences from one such project are reflected. Based on these experiences, time aspects in requirements engineering are discussed; i.e., what could be done better in requirements engineering if there were more time and what can easily be missed in requirements engineering under a tight deadline.