Requirements Engineering for Software Systems: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This article contains a systematic literature review of requirements engineering for software systems. The literature published within last 5 years was included into the review. A research question was defined as requirements development process of large scale software system (with thousands of requirements) and an interaction problem during this process (communication, coordination and control). The problem is caused by the fact that large-scale software system requirements process is a cross-disciplinary task and it involves multiple parties — stakeholders, domain experts, and suppliers with own goals and constrains, and thus, the interaction between them seriously slows down the overall requirements development process than writing the requirements specification itself. The research papers were classified by several research directions: Natural Language Processing for Requirements Engineering (NLP4RE), Requirement Prioritization, Requirements Traceability, Quality of Software Requirements, Non-functional Requirements and Requirements Elicitation. Motivation and intensity of each direction was described. Each direction was structured and represented with the key references. A contribution of each research direction into the research question was analyzed and summarized including potential further steps. It was identified that some researchers had met a part of the described problem in different forms during their researches. At the end, other researches were described additionally in a short overview. To approach the research question further potential direction was described.