Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that Requirements Engineering (RE) has an important implication for the overall success of software or system development projects. As more and more organizations consider RE as the principal problem areas in the projects, improving RE process therefore appears critical for future business success. Moreover, nowadays there are evidences that support improving RE process maturity can contributes to improved business performance. There exist generic Software Process Improvement (SPI) standards, specialised RE process improvement models as well as guidance and advices on RE. However, they suffer from various issues that limit their adoption by organizations that are interested to assess and improve their RE process capability. Therefore, the research presented in this paper proposes a new RE process improvement model. The model is built by adapting and expanding the structure of the continuous representation of the formal maturity framework Capability Maturity Model Integration for Development (CMMI-DEV) developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) through three rounds of development and validation stages, which involved RE and CMMI expert panel in the software industry. This paper aims to provide an overview on what, why and how we build the maturity model for RE. The intention is to provide a foundation for future development in the area of RE process improvement.
Highlights
System and software development projects have been plagued with problems since the 1960s [1]
We found out that many “good” practices were omitted from the Capability Maturity Model for Integration (CMMI) because they could not be generalized to the broad audience of the model as stated by Moore [43]
The Requirements Engineering (RE) process maturity model is built based on the CMMI-DEV and initially SCAMPI Class C seems appropriate for the reference model as according to Hayes et al [34], the SCAMPI is “applicable to a wide range of appraisal usage modes, including both internal process improvement and external capability determinations”
Summary
System and software development projects have been plagued with problems since the 1960s [1]. Results of three surveys involving software development companies in UK [15,16], Australia [17], and Malaysia [18] confirmed that these companies still considered RE problems very significant Another survey [19], clearly demonstrate that RE process improvement is an important issue. A European survey of organizations engaged in SPI programs during the 1980s confirmed that the SPI models available offered no cure for Requirements Engineering problems [13] These enthusiastic adopters of SPI programs found that while SPI brought them significant benefits, their problems in handling requirements remain hard to solve. This and several other problems related to the process have motivated the development of several specialised RE process improvement models. We present an overview of model components, and section four summarizes and concludes this paper
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