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.
- Daniel M. Berry. 2017. Evaluation of Tools for Hairy Requirements and Software Engineering Tasks. 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW) (2017), 284--291.Google Scholar
- Kathy Charmaz. 2006. Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis (Introducing Qualitative Methods series). SAGE Publications.Google Scholar
- Daniela Damian and James Chisan. 2006. An empirical study of the complex relationships between requirements engineering processes and other processes that lead to payoffs in productivity, quality, and risk management. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 32, 7 (2006), 433--453. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juan M Carrillo De Gea, Joaquín Nicolás, José L. Fernández Alemán, Ambrosio Toval, Christof Ebert, and Aurora Vizcaíno. 2012. Requirements engineering tools: Capabilities, survey and assessment. Information and Software Technology 54, 10 (2012), 1142--1157. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Tore Dybå. 2005. An empirical investigation of the key factors for success in software process improvement. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 31, 5 (2005), 410--424. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Méndez Fernández and Stefan Wagner. 2015. Naming the pain in requirements engineering: A design for a global family of surveys and first results from Germany. Information and Software Technology 57 (2015), 616--643.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Daniel Méndez Fernández, Stefan Wagner, Marcos Kalinowski, Michael Felderer, Priscilla Mafra, Antonio Vetrò, Tayana Conte, Magne Christiansson, Desmond Greer, Casper Lassenius, et al. 2017. Naming the pain in requirements engineering. Empirical software engineering 22, 5 (2017), 2298--2338. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Daniel Méndez Fernández, Stefan Wagner, Klaus Lochmann, Andrea Baumann, and Holger de Carne. 2012. Field study on requirements engineering: Investigation of artefacts, project parameters, and execution strategies. Information and Software Technology 54, 2 (2012), 162--178. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Donald Firesmith. 2004. Prioritizing requirements. Journal of Object Technology 3, 8 (2004), 35--48.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Xavier Franch, Daniel Mendéz Fernández, Marc Oriol, Andreas Vogelsang, Rogardt Heldal, Eric Knauss, Guillerme Travassos, Jeffrey Carver, Oscar Dieste, and Thomas Zimmermann. 2017. How do Practitioners Perceive the Relevance of Requirements Engineering Research? An Ongoing Study. In 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). 382--387.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Heli Hiisilä, Marjo Kauppinen, and Sari Kujala. 2015. Challenges of the Customer Organization's Requirements Engineering Process in the Outsourced Environment-A Case Study. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 214--229.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Axel Hoffmann, Andrej Janzen, Holger Hoffmann, and J Leimeister. 2014. Success Factors for Requirement Patterns Approaches Exploring Requirements Analysts' Opinions and Whishes. (2014).Google Scholar
- Hubert Hofmann and Franz Lehner. 2001. Requirements engineering as a success factor in software projects. IEEE software 18, 4 (2001), 58. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sofija Hotomski, Eya Ben Charrada, and Martin Glinz. 2016. An exploratory study on handling requirements and acceptance test documentation in industry. In Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2016 IEEE 24th International. IEEE, 116--125.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Timo Johann, Christoph Stanik, Alizadeh Alireza, and Walid Maalej. 2017. SAFE: A Simple Approach for Feature Extraction from App Descriptions and App Reviews. 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE) (2017), 21--30.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Walid Maalej, Zijad Kurtanovic, and Alexander Felfernig. 2014. What stakeholders need to know about requirements. In Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE), 2014 IEEE Fourth International Workshop on. IEEE, 64--71.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Walid Maalej, Maleknaz Nayebi, Timo Johann, and Guenther Ruhe. 2016. Toward data-driven requirements engineering. IEEE Software 33, 1 (2016), 48--54. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michele Marchesi, Giancarlo Succi, Don Wells, Laurie Williams, and James Donovan Wells. 2003. Extreme programming perspectives. Vol. 176. Addison-Wesley.Google Scholar
- Tommi Mikkonen, Casper Lassenius, Tomi Männistö, Markku Oivo, and Janne Järvinen. 2018. Continuous and collaborative technology transfer: Software engineering research with real-time industry impact. Information and Software Technology 95 (2018), 34--45.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman. 1994. Qualitative data analysis: An expanded sourcebook. sage.Google Scholar
- Cristina Palomares, Xavier Franch, and Davide Fucci. 2018. Personal Recommendations in Requirements Engineering: The OpenReq Approach. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 297--304.Google Scholar
- Cristina Palomares, Carme Quer, and Xavier Franch. 2017. Requirements reuse and requirement patterns: a state of the practice survey. Empirical Software Engineering 22, 6 (2017), 2719--2762. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mikko Raatikainen, Tomi Männistö, Teemu Tommila, and Janne Valkonen. 2011. Challenges of requirements engineering---A case study in nuclear energy domain. In Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2011 19th IEEE International. IEEE, 253--258. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Björn Regnell and Sjaak Brinkkemper. 2005. Market-driven requirements engineering for software products. In Engineering and managing software requirements. Springer, 287--308.Google Scholar
- Björn Regnell, Richard Berntsson Svensson, and Krzysztof Wnuk. 2008. Can we beat the complexity of very large-scale requirements engineering?. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 123--128. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Patrick Rempel, Patrick Mçder, and Tobias Kuschke. 2013. An empirical study on project-specific traceability strategies. In Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2013 21st IEEE International. IEEE, 195--204.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Per Runeson and Martin Höst. 2009. Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical software engineering 14, 2 (2009), 131. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Carolyn B. Seaman. 1999. Qualitative methods in empirical studies of software engineering. IEEE Transactions on software engineering 25, 4 (1999), 557--572. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Neetu Kumari Sethia and Anitha S Pillai. 2014. The effects of requirements elicitation issues on software project performance: An empirical analysis. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 285--300. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ernst Sikora, Bastian Tenbergen, and Klaus Pohl. 2011. Requirements engineering for embedded systems: An investigation of industry needs. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 151--165. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Muhammad Usman, Emilia Mendes, and Jürgen Börstler. 2015. Effort estimation in agile software development: a survey on the state of the practice. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. ACM, 12. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Muhammad Usman, Emilia Mendes, Francila Weidt, and Ricardo Britto. 2014. Effort estimation in agile software development: a systematic literature review. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering. ACM, 82--91. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cathrin Weiss, Rahul Premraj, Thomas Zimmermann, and Andreas Zeller. 2007. How long will it take to fix this bug?. In Mining Software Repositories, 2007. ICSE Workshops MSR'07. Fourth International Workshop on. IEEE, 1--1. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Krzysztof Wnuk, Björn Regnell, and Brian Berenbach. 2011. Scaling up requirements engineering-exploring the challenges of increasing size and complexity in market-driven software development. In International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. Springer, 54--59. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Robert K Yin. 2017. Case study research and applications: Design and methods. Sage publications.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Needs and challenges for a platform to support large-scale requirements engineering: a multiple-case study
Recommendations
A case study on benefits and side-effects of agile practices in large-scale requirements engineering
AREW '11: Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Agile Requirements EngineeringIn the software industry, there is a strong shift from traditional phase-based development towards agile methods and practices. This paper reports on a case study aimed at investigating if, and how, agile Requirements Engineering (RE) can remedy the ...
Agile quality requirements engineering challenges: first results from a case study
ESEM '17: Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and MeasurementAgile software development methods have become increasingly popular in the last years. Despite their popularity, they have been criticized for focusing on delivering functional requirements and neglecting the quality requirements. Several studies have ...
A multi-case study of agile requirements engineering and the use of test cases as requirements
ContextIt is an enigma that agile projects can succeed 'without requirements' when weak requirements engineering is a known cause for project failures. While agile development projects often manage well without extensive requirements test cases are ...
Comments