Presentation

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical area in software development, as figuring out what to develop and include in a product is a cornerstone activity which all others depend upon. Countless studies of unsuccessful development projects report that lack in RE is often a core-contributing failure factor [1]. A core piece of RE are the requirements elicitation, specification and reuse processes.

Requirements elicitation is typically seen as the first step of RE [2]. It refers to the activities undertaken to surface the requirements of a system to be built or a problem to be solved [3]. Requirements specification involves describing adequately the elicited requirements. The main and most important specification task is to document the requirements for the system to be in a suitable manner [4]. Finally, requirements reuse refers to taking advantage of requirements knowledge obtained from previous projects and later on using this knowledge in a new one.

In order to understand better how requirements elicitation, specification and reuse practices are made in industry, we conducted an interview-based empirical study involving 12 Swedish companies and 24 senior experienced practitioners.

For more information on the study see also:

References

[1] The Project Management Institute (PMI), “Pulse of the Profession® In-Depth Report: Requirements Management — A Core Competency for Project and Program Success”, 2014.
[2] B. Nuseibeh and S. Easterbrook, “Requirements engineering: a roadmap”, in Procs. of the Conference on the Future of Software Eng. (ICSE’00) ACM, pp. 35–46, 2000.
[3] I. Sommerville and G. Kotonya, “Requirements engineering: processes and techniques”, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998.
[4] K. Pohl and C. Rupp, Requirements Engineering Fundamentals, O'Reilly, 2011.