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Needs and challenges for a platform to support large-scale requirements engineering: a multiple-case study

Published: 11 October 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software as well as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders motivate the development of methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The empirical study presented in this paper aim to identify and understand the characteristics and challenges of a platform, as desired by experts, to support requirement engineering for individual stakeholders, based on the current pain-points of their organizations when dealing with a large number requirements. Method: We conducted a multiple case study with three companies in different domains. We collected data through ten semi-structured interviews with experts from these companies. Results: The main pain-point for stakeholders is handling the vast amount of data from different sources. The foreseen platform should leverage such data to manage changes in requirements according to customers' and users' preferences. It should also offer stakeholders an estimation of how long a requirements engineering task will take to complete, along with an easier requirements dependency identification and requirements reuse strategy. Conclusions: The findings provide empirical evidence about how practitioners wish to improve their requirement engineering processes and tools. The insights are a starting point for in-depth investigations into the problems and solutions presented. Practitioners can use the results to improve existing or design new practices and tools.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    ESEM '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
    October 2018
    487 pages
    ISBN:9781450358231
    DOI:10.1145/3239235
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 11 October 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. case study
    2. large-scale requirement engineering
    3. recommender systems
    4. stakeholders productivity
    5. user participation

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