Analysis of requirements engineering techniques for IT-enabled product service systems

Abstract

Product service systems (PSS) are introduced by many companies to increase their differentiation and to provide integrated solutions to customers. PSS are integrated solutions consisting of physical products, software and services aiming at providing an individualized solution to a customer's problem. The specific attributes of PSS lead to specific requirements for requirements engineering (RE). The goal of this paper is to analyze to which degree the analysis techniques of software engineering are suitable for PSS. We therefore conducted a structured literature review of software engineering techniques. The criteria for assessing the suitability of the techniques were based on the characteristics of PSS and the task of RE in the development process of PSS. We analyzed five textbooks and 144 scientific articles and identified 27 groups of techniques. The result is that there are major gaps in techniques for RE for PSS. Two of ten criteria are not satisfied by any technique. Moreover, for the majority of tasks of RE multiple techniques have to be combined for satisfying the criteria. In summary, the literature review shows that the techniques of software engineering are largely not directly applicable to PSS.