Challenges In Requirements Engineering Research Articles

Challenges of Requirements Engineering in Agile Projects: A Systematic Review

The practice of Requirements Engineering (RE) within Agile development contexts markedly differs from that within traditional development process. As the RE discipline in Agile Software Development continues to evolve, this research highlights and assesses various challenges to refine its impact on software product development. This study describes inductive and empirical research on Agile RE challenges and practices based on an analysis of data collected in the binding academic and scientific literature. This research is also based on the guidelines of a Systematic Review of the Literature (SRL) proposed by Kitchenham. Our results indicate eight type of challenges that we grouped into four themes: suitability delimitations, on software product development projects, the formation of the development team, and the efficient participation of the client during the process. Finally, this paper contributes detailed insights into RE challenges specific to Agile project development, evaluates their resolution extent, and outlines existing research gaps in RE practices

Requirements and software engineering for automotive perception systems: an interview study

Driving automation systems, including autonomous driving and advanced driver assistance, are an important safety-critical domain. Such systems often incorporate perception systems that use machine learning to analyze the vehicle environment. We explore new or differing topics and challenges experienced by practitioners in this domain, which relate to requirements engineering (RE), quality, and systems and software engineering. We have conducted a semi-structured interview study with 19 participants across five companies and performed thematic analysis of the transcriptions. Practitioners have difficulty specifying upfront requirements and often rely on scenarios and operational design domains (ODDs) as RE artifacts. RE challenges relate to ODD detection and ODD exit detection, realistic scenarios, edge case specification, breaking down requirements, traceability, creating specifications for data and annotations, and quantifying quality requirements. Practitioners consider performance, reliability, robustness, user comfort, and—most importantly—safety as important quality attributes. Quality is assessed using statistical analysis of key metrics, and quality assurance is complicated by the addition of ML, simulation realism, and evolving standards. Systems are developed using a mix of methods, but these methods may not be sufficient for the needs of ML. Data quality methods must be a part of development methods. ML also requires a data-intensive verification and validation process, introducing data, analysis, and simulation challenges. Our findings contribute to understanding RE, safety engineering, and development methodologies for perception systems. This understanding and the collected challenges can drive future research for driving automation and other ML systems.

Requirement Engineering Challenges in Global Software Development: Empirical Study

Requirement Engineering Challenges in Global Software Development: Empirical Study

Using Conceptual Models in Agile Software Development: A Possible Solution to Requirements Engineering Challenges in Agile Projects

Studies on requirements engineering with Agile methods for software development have shown difficulties in managing the quality of the requirements and communicating with users. Some of these studies have proposed conceptual modeling as a solution to these problems. However, the effort that is required to create conceptual models conflicts with Agile values. In this paper, we propose an approach for using conceptual models in projects while adhering to Agile principles. This approach focuses on projects in which requirements are expressed as user stories that are the main artifacts of the requirements used for software development with Agile methods. First, the paper presents a literature review in which we have systematically searched for the challenges to requirements engineering with Agile methods. Next, we report on a survey study in which we interviewed 16 experts in the Agile methodology to confirm the identified challenges and find new ones that are not covered in the literature. Based on a thematic analysis of the challenges, we argue that most of them map to the two main purposes of using conceptual models in software development: improving communication and understanding requirements. To effectively use conceptual models in projects that use the Agile methodology, several conditions must be met, which we make explicit in the paper. The paper ends by illustrating how these conditions can be met demonstrating the models that can be automatically generated from a given set of user stories. This demonstration was subsequently used to obtain feedback from the experts on the perceived benefits of conceptual models in addressing the challenges of requirements engineering.

Requirement Engineering Challenges for Social Sector Software Development: Insights from Multiple Case Studies

Diversity is a great challenge for software engineers in the social sector context. The objective of this paper is to contribute to the identification of the RE processes and associated challenges in releasing the software in the social sector markets for which an exploratory case study is conducted. The outcome of the case study indicates that the diversity limits the ability to involve the representative samples of user populations using the same set of RE tools and techniques as one size fits all solution for all segments. The diverse user base must be partitioned into different segments, with each segment triggered using a suitable set of RE techniques i.e., traditional and crowd-based RE. The diverse perspectives learned as a result of the interaction with each segment, must be merged together into a single perspective about the software meant to be used in the social sector. There is a need for a new RE process specially designed for handling the complexities of the social sector, which this paper terms as Social Sector Requirement Engineering (SSRE). There is an increased need for collaboration between government social sector institutions and software engineers to get access to diverse customers to improve software quality.

Requirement Engineering Challenges in Agile Software Development

Agile software development has large success rate due to its benefits and promising nature but natively where the size of the project is small. Requirement engineering (RE) is crucial as in each software development life cycle, “Requirements” play a vital role. Though agile provides values to customer’s business needs, changing requirement, and interaction, we also have to face impediments in agile, many of which are related to requirement challenges. This article aims to find out the challenges being faced during requirement engineering of agile projects. Many research studies have been conducted on requirement challenges which are somehow biased, no suggestions are given to improve the agile development process, and the research does not highlight large-scale agile development challenges. Hence, this article covers all the challenges discussed above and presents a comprehensive overview of agile models from requirement engineering perspective. The findings and results can be very helpful for software industry to improve development process as well as for researchers who want to work further in this direction.

Requirement Engineering Challenges: A Systematic Mapping Study on the Academic and the Industrial Perspective

Requirement engineering (RE) is the process of discovering stakeholders’ requirements and needs and documenting them in such a way that they can serve as the basis for all other system development activities. Despite recent advances in RE practices and tools, requirements engineers are still experiencing fundamental problems. Therefore, the identification and characterization of such challenges would help RE practitioners manage and overcome such difficulties allowing them to meet expected quality objectives. The main objective of this paper is to identify and compare RE challenges reported in the literature and in practice. To this aim, we have conducted a systematic mapping study to collect and analyze RE challenges in the literature. Furthermore, we have also conducted a questionnaire-based empirical investigation to collect and analyze RE challenges faced by IT practitioners working for 15 companies located in four different countries. Results show that the top challenges are the same in the literature and in practice. However, overall, our comparative study revealed a weak positive correlation between RE challenges in the literature and in practice (Spearman coefficient = 0.3061). This weak positive relationship indicates that some of the challenges found in the literature are not perceived by the participant to have a great impact on the practice. This may be due to the fact that solutions to (or guidelines to avoid) some of the identified challenges have been provided by the surveyed corporations.

Factors influencing the requirements engineering process in offshore software development outsourcing environments

Offshore software development outsourcing (OSDO) is one of the popular development paradigms in the software industry. There are a number of challenges associated with OSDO including the challenges related to requirements engineering (RE) process. The objective of this study is to identify success factors (SFs) associated with RE processes in the OSDO context. A total of 25 SFs were identified using systematic literature review (SLR) and the identified SFs were further validated with practitioners using a questionnaire-based survey. The authors also examined the identified RE challenges with respect to their relevance for different organisation types (client and vendor) and sizes (small, medium, and large) with an aim to provide a clear understanding of the RE process and its SFs in the context of various OSDO organisations. They also conducted a comparative analysis between the SLR and questionnaire findings and the results indicate that there is a moderately positive correlation between the data sets. They believe that the findings of this study will provide a comprehensive model to help OSDO organisations assess and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their RE activities.

Importance of Process Mining for Big Data Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE), as a part of the project development life cycle, has increasingly been recognized as the key to ensure on-time, on-budget, and goal-based delivery of software projects. RE of big data projects is even more crucial because of the rapid growth of big data applications over the past few years. Data processing, being a part of big data RE, is an essential job in driving big data RE process successfully. Business can be overwhelmed by data and underwhelmed by the information so, data processing is very critical in big data projects. Employing traditional data processing techniques lacks the invention of useful information because of the main characteristics of big data, including high volume, velocity, and variety. Data processing can be benefited by process mining, and in turn, helps to increase the productivity of the big data projects. In this paper, the capability of process mining in big data RE to discover valuable insights and business values from event logs and processes of the systems has been highlighted. Also, the proposed big data requirements engineering framework, named REBD, helps software requirements engineers to eradicate many challenges of big data RE.

Seizing Requirements Engineering Issues through Supervised Learning Techniques

In recent years, the popularity of machine learning techniques has grown due to the availability of larges volumes of data and the increased processing capacity of computers. Despite the inherent value of these techniques, few studies have attempted to summarize how machine learning algorithms, especially supervised learning have contributed to task automation and resolving challenges in Requirements Engineering. This paper proposes a systematic mapping of the literature to identify and analyze proposals which employ supervised learning in Requirements Engineering between 2002-2018. The goal of this research is to identify trends, datasets, and methods used. Thirty-three studies were selected based on defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. The results show that researches using these techniques focuses on eight broad categories: detection of linguistic problems in requirements documents and artifacts written in natural language, classification of document content, traceability, effort estimation, requirements analysis, failures prediction, quality and detection of business rules. The most used supervised learning algorithms were Support Vector Machine, Naive Bayes, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbour, and Random Forest. Twenty-five public and twenty -eight private data sources were identified. Among the most used public data sources are Predictor Models in Software Engineering, iTrust Electronic Health Care System and Metric Data Program from NASA.

Representing software project vision by means of video: A quality model for vision videos

Establishing a shared software project vision is a key challenge in Requirements Engineering (RE). Several approaches use videos to represent visions. However, these approaches omit how to produce a good video. This missing guidance is one crucial reason why videos are not established in RE. We propose a quality model for videos representing a vision, so-called vision videos. Based on two literature reviews, we elaborate ten quality characteristics of videos and five quality characteristics of visions which together form a quality model for vision videos that includes all 15 quality characteristics. We provide two representations of the quality model: (a) a hierarchical decomposition of vision video quality into the quality characteristics and (b) a mapping of these characteristics to the video production and use process. While the hierarchical decomposition supports the evaluation of vision videos, the mapping provides guidance for video production. In an evaluation with 139 students, we investigated whether the 15 characteristics are related to the overall quality of vision videos perceived by the subjects from a developer’s the point of view. Six characteristics (video length, focus, prior knowledge, clarity, pleasure, and stability) correlated significantly with the likelihood that the subjects perceived a vision video as good. These relationships substantiate a fundamental relevance of the proposed quality model. Therefore, we conclude that the quality model is a sound basis for future refinements and extensions.

Requirement Engineering Challenges in Distributed Software Development

In process of software development, requirement engineering is one of the main pillars and important elements because of the role it plays. Requirements acts as baseline upon which the pacts between the team members, people using it and those purchasing it are affirmed. For an increasing number of globalization and technological reasons, it is imperative to note that software development has grown in recent years and has resulted in several changes that are crucial in the establishment of development projects. The change is supported and geared by the desire to work round the clock and capitalize on the extensive number of available resources, reduce on expenses and the urge to be near or closer to the users but the negative effect of such applications is the risks associated with gaps in communications. The distributed development of software is a complex phenomenon, facing the challenges like: geographical separation of project members, different time zones, different languages, different backgrounds, team structure, organizational structure, communication and technology to be used for communication and coordination.

Special issue on just-in-time requirements engineering for software integration

Abstract This special issue tackles specific challenges of requirements engineering (RE) in agile and interconnected settings. Compared to traditional upfront RE, the practices in agile or open-source software projects tend to be just-in-time, characterized by lightweight representation and continuous refinement of requirements. The special issue features six articles, ranging from conceptual views through analytic reasonings to empirical studies. Altogether, the collection offers important and timely contributions toward advancing our understanding of RE in industrial information integration and Industry 4.0.

English

English

An extended systematic mapping study about the scalability of i* Models

i* models have been used for requirements specification in many domains, such as healthcare, telecommunication, and air traffic control. Managing the scalability and the complexity of such models is an important challenge in Requirements Engineering (RE). Scalability is also one of the most intractable issues in the design of visual notations in general: a well-known problem with visual representations is that they do not scale well. This issue has led us to investigate scalability in i* models and its variants by means of a systematic mapping study. This paper is an extended version of a previous paper on the scalability of i* including papers indicated by specialists. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges and open issues regarding scalability of i* models and its variants. A total of 126 papers were analyzed in order to understand: how the RE community perceives scalability; and which proposals have considered this topic. We found that scalability issues are indeed perceived as relevant and that further work is still required, even though many potential solutions have already been proposed. This study can be a starting point for researchers aiming to further advance the treatment of scalability in i* models.

Organisation and communication problems in automotive requirements engineering

Project success in the automotive industry is highly influenced by requirements engineering (RE), for which communication and organisation structure play a major role, much due to the scale and distribution of these projects. However, empirical research is scarce on these aspects of automotive RE and warrants closer examination. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to identify problems or challenges in automotive RE with respect to communication and organisation structure. Using a multiple-case study approach, we collected data via 14 semi-structured interviews at one car manufacturer and one supplier. We tested our findings from the case study with a questionnaire distributed to practitioners in the automotive industry. Our results indicate that it is difficult but increasingly important to establish communication channels outside the fixed organisation structure and that responsibilities are often unclear. Product knowledge during early requirements elicitation and context knowledge later on is lacking. Furthermore, abstraction gaps between requirements on different abstraction levels leads to inconsistencies. For academia, we formulate a concrete agenda for future research. Practitioners can use the findings to broaden their understanding of how the problems manifest and to improve their organisations.

Situated Boundary Spanning

Requirements Engineering (RE) faces considerable challenges that are often related to boundaries between various stakeholders involved in the software development process. These challenges may be addressed by boundary spanning practices. We examine how boundary spanning can be adapted to address RE challenges in Product Family Development (PFD), a context that involves complex RE. We study two different development approaches, namely, conventional and agile PFD, because these present considerably different challenges. Our findings from a multisite case study present boundary spanning as a solution to improve the quality of RE processes and highlight interesting differences in how boundary spanner roles and boundary objects are adapted in conventional and agile PFD.

The Study of Available Techniques for Existing Requirements Engineering Challenges Based on Literature Review Evidences

It is well known that software engineering suffer from various challenges. Moreover, numerous researchers found that project challenges have a negative effect on project time cost and user satisfaction. Additionally, Numerous Requirements Engineering (RE) methods have been proposed to improve the quality of requirements documents and to increase customer satisfaction about final product. Nevertheless, the choosing between various techniques may be confusing and puzzling. Therefore, this study aims to present, Literature review based study to link between RE challenges and available techniques to eliminate challenges using the utmost appropriate technique. Study conclusions are relevant for both industry and academic researchers in order to achieve effective software requirement engineering.

A holistic approach to feature modeling for product line requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) offers the means to discover, model, and manage the requirements of the products that comprise a product line, while software product line engineering (SPLE) offers the means of realizing the products' requirements from a common base of software assets. In practice, however, RE and SPLE have proven to be less complementary than they should. While some RE techniques, particularly goal modeling, support the exploration of alternative solutions, the appropriate solution is typically conditional on context and a large product line may have many product-defining contexts. Thus, scalability and traceability through into product line features are key challenges for RE. Feature modeling, by contrast, has been widely accepted as a way of modeling commonality and variability of products of a product line that may be very complex. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven feature modeling approach that separates a feature space in terms of problem space and solution space features, and establish explicit mappings between them. This approach contributes to reducing the inherent complexity of a mixed-view feature model, deriving key engineering drivers for developing core assets of a product line, and facilitating the quality-based product configuration.

Strategic requirements engineering for complex sustainable systems

AbstractThe development of complex sustainable systems presents a number of challenges in requirements engineering (RE). It is difficult to elicit, analyze, and specify interdisciplinary system requirements that have to be fulfilled in order to develop a complex sustainable system. This paper argues for a need for a significant shift in the underlying RE ideas and premises in order to effectively cope with RE challenges of complex sustainable systems development. We present the main requirements for the development of strategic RE methods based on a number of systems, methodological, and epistemological perspective shifts. Strategic RE paradigm shift facilitates adaptation of primarily technological system‐specific RE knowledge in order to handle large scale interdisciplinary sustainability‐related RE challenges. ©2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 16