RE Practices Research Articles

Investigating the Maturity of RE Practices and the Adoption of Human Values in Industry from the Perspective of Software Engineering Practitioners

Investigating the Maturity of RE Practices and the Adoption of Human Values in Industry from the Perspective of Software Engineering Practitioners

Investigating Agile Requirements Engineering Practices in the South African Software Development Market

The aim of this research study was to assess Agile RE practices in the South African software development industry and investigate secure Agile RE initiatives towards developing secure products. This qualitative research study was contextualized in seventeen South African software development companies. The researchers used structured interviews and document reviews as the primary data collection instruments. Qualitative data was analyzed inductively using content analysis. Emanating from the research were recommendations to guide a regular software developer on good Agile RE practices. The study concluded that although Agile Software Development is practiced in the South African software industry, there needs to be stricter adherences to the Agile Manifesto and Agile Security Manifesto in requirements engineering.

Understanding information needs of agile teams to improve requirements communication

Abstract For traditional software development processes, we have detailed empirical knowledge about role-specific information needs that have to be satisfied in requirements documents. Particularly, we gained detailed knowledge about priorities of a set of traditional requirements artifacts in a series of empirical studies from the viewpoint of software architects, usability engineers, and testers. However, little is known about such information needs from the viewpoint of agile team members. Motivated by the widespread use of agile development approaches and existing challenges faced by requirements engineering in agile projects, our current research aims at investigating whether agile teams could also benefit from the empirical results regarding information needs that we gained in our previous research. We envision the development of guidelines based on empirical data in order to support the extensive collaboration and communication necessary in agile projects. In this paper, we present our research agenda as well as first results of our work. This includes a mapping analyis by the authors where the scope and content of the outcome of agile RE practices (e.g., user stories) was compared to previously investigated traditional RE artifacts. This analysis shows that artifacts resulting from agile practices cover key requirements information, but at a lower level of detail than in traditional RE artifacts. Based on these first findings, we conducted interviews and performed surveys with agile team members in order to better understand current challenges and the possible impacts of these challenges. The results reveal that, for instance, less detailed documentation leads to problems such as communication lapses, rework and product inconsistencies in agile settings. We also gained first insights regarding the relevance of agile RE practices from the viewpoint of different agile team members. Finally, we elaborated initial guidelines to be used and evaluated within the scope of industry and research projects in the near future.

Challenges in the development of green and sustainable software for software multisourcing vendors: Findings from a systematic literature review and industrial survey

AbstractGreen and sustainable software development has emerged in recent years, and vendors are constantly striving to develop software that has a less hazardous impact on the environment, economy, and human beings. However, developing green software in the context of software multisourcing is not a risk‐free activity, and vendors are exposed to several challenges. The authors have conducted both a systematic literature review and an industrial survey to identify the challenges faced by multisourcing vendors in the development of green and sustainable software. The final publication sample for the systematic literature review is composed of 54 research papers. Similarly, the final sample of the industrial survey is composed of 108 relevant experts. The authors have identified a list of 14 challenges. Of these challenges/risk factors, 8 have been tagged as critical risk factors. These critical risk factors are “lack of green RE practices,” “high power consumption,” “high carbon emission throughout the software development,” “poor software design (architectural, logical, physical, and user interface),” “lack of ICTs for coordination and communication,” “high resource requirements,” “lack of coding standards,” and “lack of green software development knowledge.”

Impact and Challenges of Requirement Engineering in Agile Methodologies: A Systematic Review

Requirement Engineering is one of important stage in development life cycle. All requirements required for development of product is collected in this phase. A high standard product can be developed by agile methodology in less budget and time. Importance of agile practices have been enhanced since it offers assist cooperation too software engineering. Being basic phase of software engineering, requirement engineering has different processes. The elements of direct correspondence is one of spry way which not at all like to other conventional and traditional approaches .Although a lot of research has been done on agile practices and role of requirement in agile methodologies but still there is need of studies on change manage management ,requirement prioritization, prototyping and nonfunctional requirement in agile methodologies. Aim of this review paper is to present the limitations in presentation of requirement engineering phases in agile practices and what are the issues and challenges that agile person faces in implementation of agile practices. Many research studies from different sources have been reviewed on basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Most RE activities has been discussed in review. Evidence helps to prove that how RE process was performed in scrums. Mostly research has been conducted on general agile methodologies, few authors specified RE practices in other methodologies of agile. Finding of this research is the work of researchers that will be beneficial for those who are interested in finding interesting area of research in this field because many techniques of agile (extreme programming, crystal methodology, lean ) requires further study and practical results as clarified by studies.

Scrum Requirements Engineering Practices and Challenges in Offshore Software Development

Engineering is one of the hardest tasks in developing a software system. Reports state that incomplete requirements are the third most important factor for project failure. Today more and more companies are embracing agile methods to develop software. As light weight methods, agile methods have their own requirements engineering practices which are in contrast to traditional requirements engineering practices. Scrum is a widely used agile method in Sri Lanka, a country where a lot of offshore software development is beingcarried out. This study investigated the level of scrum requirements engineering practices adopted in Sri Lanka and the challenges introduced by these practices. This research wasconducted using qualitative methods. Respondents who play different job roles from nine organizations were interviewed in order to collect data. Majority of the respondents successfully practices the scrum RE practices, face to face communication, requirements prioritization, iterative requirements engineering and managing requirements change. Some organizations were not comfortable with the test driven development. The main issue with offshore development is achieving continuous customer involvement and interaction throughout the project. As agile methods rely on customer involvement more than any other development methodology, this might have a bad influence on the project.

Towards Knowledge Management in RE Practices to Support Software Development

Requirement engineering in any software development is the most important phase to ensure the success or failure of software. Knowledge modeling and management are helping tools to learn the software organizations. The traditional Requirements engineering practices are based upon the interaction of stakeholders which causes iteratively changes in requirements and difficulties in communication and understanding problem domain etc. So, to resolve such issues we use knowledge based techniques to support the RE practices as well as software development process. Our technique is based on two prospective, theoretical and practical implementations. In this paper, we described the need of knowledge management in software engineering and then proposed a model based on knowledge management to support the software development process. To verify our results, we used controlled experiment approach. We have implemented our model, and verify results by using and without using proposed knowledge based RE process. Our resultant proposed model can save the overall cost and time of requirement engineering process as well as software development.

Goal-driven requirements analysis for hypermedia-intensive Web applications

Requirements analysis for Web applications still needs to employ effective RE practices to accommodate some distinctive aspects: capturing high-level communication goals, considering several user profiles, defining hypermedia-specific requirements, bridging the gap between requirements and Web design, and reusing requirements for an effective usability evaluation. Techniques should be usable, informal, require little training effort, and show relative advantage to project managers. On the basis of the i * framework, this paper presents a proposal for defining hypermedia requirements (concerning aspects such as content, interaction, navigation, and presentation) for Web applications. The model adopts a goal-driven approach coupled with scenario-based techniques, introduces a hypermedia requirement taxonomy to facilitate Web conceptual design, and paves the way for systematic usability evaluation. Particular attention is paid to the empirical validation of the model based on the perceived quality attributes theory. A case study developed with industrial partners is discussed.

Requirements engineering as a success factor in software projects

Requirements engineering might be the single most important part of any software project. Based on their field study of 15 RE teams in nine software organizations, the authors identify the RE practices that clearly contribute to project success, particularly in terms of team knowledge, resource allocation, and process. They then summarize the best practices exhibited by the most successful teams.