Requirements Engineering Process Research Articles

REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING CHALLENGES IN OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: A MULTIVOCAL LITERATURE REVIEW PROTOCOL WITH PRELIMINARY RESULTS

In the dynamic landscape of software development, open source software (OSS) has acquired traction due to its collaborative and transparent nature. In OSS, source code of the software is accessible to users under a copyright license. The license allows the users to examine, improve, alter and distribute the software either in modified or unmodified form. Richard Stallman, programmer at MIT, presented the idea of making source code freely accessible in the year 1983, from an ideological movement. Users must accept the conditions of a license before the use of OSS. Requirement engineering (RE) is the process of gathering requirements statements, along with the documentation and analysis for a project. Requirements that are insufficient, unclear, inconsistent, and incomplete, may adversely affect software development. In OSS, requirements emerge through online conversations, as well as discussions evolve continually in different online forums and emails. Requirements’ gathering is a complex process and its practitioners may face different challenges while practicing it. A Multivocal literature review (MLR) will be conducted to find out challenges, success factors, and practices/solutions for the identified challenges in RE process of OSS. This research will help academic researcher, OSS practitioners and managers to improve RE process, leading to more efficient, effective and successful software applications.

A novel approach to elicit distributed requirements for IOT system using SVM classifier

Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the growing technologies embedded in most application systems. It aims to solve real-world problems in different environmental fields such as industry, education, healthcare etc. IoT is becoming an integral part of daily devices and technologies opening a need for efficient and novel solutions to meet functional requirements that are more complex than those in traditional requirement engineering (RE). In addition, remotely smart systems present new challenges and lack in RE process that needs a solution. IoT systems open new research issues in RE such as elicitation, analysis, specification and management of IoT RE. To solve this lack of RE new smart techniques based on AI must be applied in the elicitation RE process. This paper presents a new smart dynamic approach in the RE elicitation phase to build dynamic functional requirements based on AI models. New stakeholder expectation needs from the smart IOT system are collected and stored in the requirements dataset. These new requirements are analyzed and classified into requirement features using the Support Vector Machine classifier. These classified functional requirements are compared to the IoT system, and the positive training requirements are added to the smart functional requirement presented in the IoT system. The proposed approach shows a significant accuracy of 95.64%, where 395 features were classified and detected from 413 entered features. This paper measures the gap between stakeholder expectations and device requirements in smart systems; these proposed measures can be implemented to optimize smart device specifications for manufacturers.

Access@tour by Action: A Platform for Improving Accessible Tourism Conditions

Accessible tourism has become relevant, generating significant economic and social impacts. Even though the accessible tourism market is rising and presents an excellent business opportunity, this market is largely ignored, as it is challenging to stimulate the flow of accessibility information. Accessible technologies, such as tourism information systems, can be a potential solution, increasing accessibility through communication. However, these solutions are few and tend to fail the integration of users upon development processes. This research aims to present a technological platform to improve accessibility in the tourism industry. The name of this accessible and adaptable technological solution is access@tour by action, and it was created following a user-centered design methodology. This development involved a requirement engineering process based on three crucial stakeholders in accessible tourism: educational institutions, supply agents, and demand agents. The design phase was achieved with the help of a conceptual model based on a unified modeling language. The initial prototype of the solution, created in Adobe XD, implements a wide range of informational and accessibility requirements. Some access@tour by action interfaces outline the design, content, and primary functionalities. By linking technological development, tourism, and social inclusion components, this study highlights the relevance and interdisciplinarity of processes in developing accessible information systems.

Understanding the GDPR from a requirements engineering perspective—a systematic mapping study on regulatory data protection requirements

Data protection compliance is critical from a requirements engineering (RE) perspective, both from a software development lifecycle (SDLC) perspective and regulatory compliance. Not including these requirements from the early phases of the SDLC can prove costly and challenging afterward. The general data protection regulation (GDPR) from the European Union (EU) sets a list of requirements that organizations working within its scope should satisfy. However, these requirements are complex to work with, as legal prose tends to be vague and imprecise, and not all requirements have received the same attention from researchers. This study aims to identify the research published in RE for helping compliance with regulatory data protection requirements. We gathered and analyzed 90 articles from 2016 to 2022 through a systematic mapping study. We analyzed key trends in the sample, such as year of publication, publication venue, type of research, interdisciplinarity in the author’s background, GDPR focus of compliance element, and type of proposal. Our main findings show ongoing interest, mostly published in conferences, in achieving overall compliance with the GDPR and consent as the most popular topics. Other topics, such as cookies or children’s data, did not receive significant attention. Research over the whole RE process has been done. 20 (22%) of the papers have authors affiliated with non-computer science; however, most research seems not interdisciplinary. We finally discuss gaps in the literature, possible future areas of research, and the importance of interdisciplinary research for regulatory data protection requirements in RE.

Justice-Embedded Requirements Engineering (JERE) for system design

AbstractWe have a unique opportunity to consider justice in our design of a cleaner energy system. This paper introduces the Justice-Embedded Requirements Engineering (JERE) process, which was created to enable engineers to consider project goals, requirements, and potential project impacts on historically marginalized, climate-vulnerable communities. Given JERE's focus on energy technologies, we demonstrate the process using a concentrating solar power example. JERE provides engineers with a tool to better ensure justice is embedded in the system design process from the beginning.

Використання засобів штучного інтелекту в інженерії вимог: аналіз можливостей та чат-бот для валідації

This study investigates the processes and means of requirements engineering (RE) of software and complex information systems (SWS). The subject of this study is the instrumental means of SWS RE based on the methods of artificial (computational) intelligence (AI). The goal is to improve the accuracy and efficiency of CCD requirements development processes using AI tools by providing better communications between business teams and technical teams and automating complex requirements collection and documentation processes. The tasks are as follows: to analyze the principles and means of integrating AI tools into requirements engineering processes, the development and verification of which is a critical stage in the development of SWS; to determine the problems of using traditional SWS RE methods and perform their comparative analysis with AI-based methods; and to develop a chatbot architecture for requirements validation and identify characteristics of RE processes that are improved through its use. The results. The results of this study demonstrate that AI tools can significantly improve the accuracy, timeliness, and efficiency of requirements development processes and project team communication. An architecture and software solution for an intelligent chatbot for requirements validation is proposed, and the benefits and limitations of its application are discussed. Directions for further development and research regarding the end-to-end implementation of AI tools in IP processes have been developed.

Requirements Elicitation for a Flexible, Digital, and Methodological Manufacturing Change Management based on a Literature Review and Expert Interviews

In today’s manufacturing industry, companies operate in a complex and rapidly changing environment. This environment results in a high number and variety of Manufacturing Changes (MCs). To ensure long-term competitiveness, companies must respond quickly and effectively to various types of MCs. Although most companies have a Manufacturing Change Management (MCM) with an established process for managing MCs, the process often lacks the flexibility to handle the wide variety of MCs efficiently. Furthermore, MCM processes have a deficit in digital and methodological support, reducing the process’s effectiveness. This contribution describes a requirements engineering (RE) approach applied to elicit the requirements for a flexible, digital, and methodological MCM. For this, a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured expert interviews were conducted. A total of 18 experts from eight different industries participated in the interviews. After introducing the necessary theoretical foundations and the current state of research in the MCM literature, the RE process is described in detail. The requirements are derived separately from the literature and the expert interviews and are then consolidated. The result is a catalog of requirements for a methodology for a flexible, digital, and methodological MCM. The paper concludes with an outlook on future research perspectives based on the identified requirements.

Toward a Holistic Privacy Requirements Engineering Process: Insights From a Systematic Literature Review

Toward a Holistic Privacy Requirements Engineering Process: Insights From a Systematic Literature Review

Challenges in Early Verification and Validation of System Requirements

ABSTRACTToday, requirements engineering (RE) is a key process in the development of complex systems‐(ISO/IEC/IEEE 2015). Requirements containing quality issues such as ambiguity or inconsistency can lead to late error detection in systems design, resulting in high project cost overruns. This paper presents challenges for early system requirements verification and validation associated to an executable model‐based requirements engineering (eMBRE) process proposal.

An AHP-Based Framework for Effective Requirement Management in Agile Software Development (ASD)

In Agile changes may be made at any time throughout the project lifetime in agile projects. These changes, however, often lead to longer turnaround times and higher costs while having a substantial influence on the activities and quality of project management. The suggested framework's main goal is to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the requirement engineering process by successfully managing requirements changes, particularly in contexts where Agile Software Development (ASD) is practiced. The Agile methodology has gained popularity as a strategy for developing software because it can adjust to changing requirements and deliver software gradually. To make sure that the software being produced satisfies stakeholder expectations and adds value to the firm, good requirement management is essential. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize requirements based on their relative relevance and urgency, this article introduces a framework for requirement management in Agile Projects. The most important requirements are taken care of first thanks to this strategy, which enables a more organized and informed decision-making process. We demonstrate the actual use of our framework in real-world contexts and highlight its efficacy in solving the issues faced by Agile projects by including a case study and an accompanying table. The suggested framework also supports the three core tenets of the Agile approach—transparency, cooperation, and continuous improvement—to foster an environment of excellence and ongoing learning within the Agile team. By developing these fundamental ideas, our framework not only supports Agile teams' continual growth and development but also helps them manage and prioritize requirements more efficiently, which ultimately improves project results and increases organizational value.

Joint Impact of Agents and Services in Enhancing Software Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is a significant aspect of system development stages in generating reliable software (SW). Despite RE’s decisive impact on project success, SW systems still fail since there is a perplexity in sorting out requirements correctly. Researchers have tried several paradigms to deal with the specified challenges, such as agent-oriented RE (AORE), model-based RE, and service-oriented RE (SORE). By investigating the limitations of the independent use of these paradigms, this research sets an objective that proposes a framework which integrates the two paradigms (agent and service) on top of social media to enhance the SW RE processes. Thus, the research addresses challenges in gathering adequate requirements, detecting alignment between business requirements and SW products, prioritizing requirements, and recommending innovative ideas. The research has mainly adopted an empirical research methodology for SW engineering. Accordingly, two distinct expert groups have been formed based on their previous experience in AORE and SORE, respectively. The experts have been selected from enterprises and academic institutions, and they participated in our case study. After performing the necessary assessment based on specified criteria, those experts in the first group have reported that CASCRE (Collaboration of Agents and Services for Crowd-based Requirements Engineering) with a score of 93.7% is found to be better than that of AORE with a score of 88.7%. Moreover, experts in the second group have declared that CASCRE, with a score of 92.3%, is better than SORE, with a score of 83.7%. In both cases, improvements have been observed, which reveals that the synergy of the CASCRE features has a better impact on the RE process than utilizing individual approaches. Moreover, in order to demonstrate the applicability of CASCRE, feedback has been gathered from a focused crowd of local pharmaceuticals using a mini-prototype. Accordingly, 250 requirements related comments have been gathered from the discussion forum, and 1400 keywords were generated. Then, after performing a sentiment analysis using NLP algorithms, the result was demonstrated to experts. Therefore, 93% of gurus strongly agreed on the applicability of CASCRE in real projects.

Sustaining human health: A requirements engineering perspective

In our current day and age, Earth suffers under the human ecological footprint, which influences our health and well-being. Technological solutions, including software-related ones, may help tackle these concerns for humanity. However, the development of such solutions requires special attention and effort to overcome human, public, and social barriers that might prevent them from being effective. The Requirements Engineering for Well-Being, Aging, and Health (REWBAH) workshop gathering in 2021 focused on addressing the challenge of how Requirements Engineering (RE) knowledge and practices can be applied to the development of information systems that support and promote long-lasting, sustained, and healthier behavior and choices by individuals. An interactive discussion among subject matter experts and practitioners participating in the REWBAH’21 revolved around several questions. In a subsequent qualitative analysis, the emerging themes were arranged in the sustainable-health RE (SusHeRE) framework to describe RE processes that address both sustainability and health goals. In this vision paper, we present our framework, which includes four main SusHeRE goals defined according to the changes in RE that we deem necessary for achieving a positive contribution of RE on sustainability and health. These goals involve improved RE Techniques, Multidisciplinary Expertise, Education Agenda, and Public and Social Ecology.

Towards understanding the influence of personality and team behaviors on requirements engineering activities

<span lang="EN-US">Requirements engineers play an important role in the development of software products and services. The nature of requirements engineering (RE) is multifaceted and influences the quality, success, or failure of software products. In gathering software requirements, engineers commonly work in a team, particularly when dealing with the customers or modeling the requirements, hence the team behavior may influence the RE activities. The investigation of requirements engineers’ personality and their team behavior associated with RE activities is still an open area in which research is still developing. This study aims to investigate the personality and team behavior of requirements engineers involved in RE activities using a systematic literature review approach. We included 64 primary studies that addressed the association between personality and team behavior of requirements engineers on the effectiveness of RE activities. The result shows that among personality dimensions, extraversion and conscientiousness were found to be the predominant personality traits that positively affect RE activities. Furthermore, team behavior of requirements engineers such as flexibility, collaboration, creativity, innovation, and norms were discovered as factors that influence the RE process, performance, and success. The findings of this study contribute to the body of knowledge and practice of RE by providing empirical evidence on the influence of requirements engineers’ personality and team behavior on the effectiveness of RE activities.</span>

Automatic Requirements Engineering: Activities, Methods, Tools, and Domains – A Systematic Literature Review

Requirements engineering (RE) is an initial activity in the software engineering process that involves many users. The involvement of various users in the RE process raises ambiguity and vagueness in requirements modeling. In addition, traditional RE is a time-consuming activity. Therefore various studies have been conducted to support process automation on RE. This paper conducts a systematic literature review (SLR) to obtain information about RE automation related to RE activities, methods/models, tools, and domains. SLR is done through 5 main stages: definition of research questions, conducting the search, screening for relevant papers, data extraction, mapping, and analysis. The data extraction and mapping are carried out on 155 relevant publications from 2016 to 2022. Based on the results from SLR, around 53% of the research focuses on RE automation in analysis and specifications, 40% focuses on elicitation, validation, and requirements management, and 7% focuses on requirements quality. NLP is the most used method in elicitation and specification, while for analysis, machine learning, NLP, and goal-oriented models are mostly used in automatic RE. Furthermore, many papers use specific models and methods for validation and requirements management. From the domain analysis results, it is obtained that more than half of the papers contribute directly to the RE domain, and some contribute to the development of RE automation in the software application domain. 

Green Requirement Engineering: Towards Sustainable Mobile Application Development and Internet of Things

Mobile usage statistics show the one thing that cannot be overlooked, which is the overwhelming usage of smartphones. According to the statistics, there are approximately 6.4 billion users of smartphones. Considering the world population, this rate of smart phone usage is more than 80%. Mobile development is the fastest prominent trend, although web development cannot be denied. However, the fact is that mobile platforms are considered cumbersome and complex when it comes to accomplishing requirement engineering processes, especially when mobile applications are combined with the Internet of Things (IoT). These complexities result in barriers to sustainable mobile development. The difficulty and differences occur due to various limitations, either that of mobile devices or others. Some of those from mobile devices include processor, battery, and touch screens, user experience in terms of touch screens, user context, and interactive behaviors. Other limitations include the difference in the software development lifecycle and the difference in the software development process due to inconsistency in user requirements with the aforementioned limited device capabilities. The target objective of this research is to investigate and identify all possible challenges related to mobile applications and connected mobile devices (IoT) while executing the requirement engineering process. This study can further the existing state of knowledge by contributing to the list of challenges faced in the requirement gathering process of mobile application development. Furthermore, it can also help practitioners, specifically those involved in the requirement gathering process, to carefully consider these challenges before executing the requirement engineering process.

Competencies of a Requirement Engineer -Systematic Literature Review Protocol

Requirement Engineering (RE) is a core activity of software engineering that guarantees successful project delivery within time and budget. It needs to be considered with respect to the competencies and skills of RE to effectively execute the RE processes and individual sustainability of requirement engineers. Several skill and competency frameworks are proposed and remember in various fields, however there is no competency framework for software requirement engineers. In this research work a systematic literature review protocol is presented as an initial step to design the framework that constitutes the competencies required for RE. Focusing on the competencies and skills of a requirement engineer will help to effectively perform requirement engineering tasks that will eventually lead to the success of a project.

On identifying possible artificial intelligence applications in requirements engineering processes

Managing an ever-growing number of requirements is a time consuming and highly complex activity in product development projects. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the last decades, algorithms are now capable of supporting Requirements Engineering (RE) tasks. The algorithm’s ability to intelligently process natural language data as well as the application in RE have been published extensively. In established RE processes however, it is often unclear, where AI algorithms can be utilized. The result is a significant imbalance between state-of-the-art AI algorithms and their application rates in real RE processes. One of the reasons is, that current models of RE processes aren’t able to convey the needed information for the identification of suitable tasks. Therefore, this paper aims to provide a framework of finite and standardized process steps with a data processing-oriented perspective, that can be used to systematically identify the points in the RE processes where AI algorithms can be applied. With the standardized process steps of this framework, established RE processes can be abstracted and expressed in a way that is compatible with the scope of AI algorithms. Due to the finite number of standardized process steps, libraries of suitable AI algorithms for the defined process steps can be built, so that their applicability can be efficiently assessed. The presented framework was developed collaboratively during a research project with industry participation.

Semi-structured expert interview-based requirements elicitation for a digitalized production ramp-up

Due to the ever-shortening innovation cycles and the rapid change of customer demands, enterprises introduce new, innovative, and modern products at an increasingly faster frequency and desirably lower costs. The technological change of products and mass customization increase the product complexity. This development requires manufacturing enterprises to perform more frequent production ramp-ups. Many production ramp-up projects miss the time, cost, and quality targets, causing manufacturing enterprises to lose potential profit due to later market introduction. Although digital tools are widely applied during the serial production phase, their potential during production ramp-up is hardly investigated in the scientific literature. Moreover, no guidelines exist on how to use digital tools during the production ramp-up in various industries. To provide data-driven support for the production ramp-up phase, requirements for the functionality of digital tools need to be defined. Henceforth, this paper applies a requirements engineering (RE) approach to elicit the requirements for digital tools to support the production ramp-up phase based on a comprehensive literature review and semi-structured expert interviews. In total, 13 experts from seven different industries participated in the interviews. After introducing the necessary theoretical foundations and the current state of research in ramp-up management literature, the RE process is described in detail. The RE process is based on user stories – an agile development tool – and the ISO 29148, which outlines an international standard for RE processes. The result is a set of requirements for the functionality of digital tools during the production ramp-up phase. Finally, the paper presents an outlook on future research perspectives for applying the elicited requirements in practice.

Empirical Analysis of Software Success Rate Forecasting During Requirement Engineering Processes

Forecasting on success or failure of software has become an interesting and, in fact, an essential task in the software development industry. In order to explore the latest data on successes and failures, this research focused on certain questions such as is early phase of the software development life cycle better than later phases in predicting software success and avoiding high rework? What human factors contribute to success or failure of a software? What software practices are used by the industry practitioners to achieve high quality of software in their day-to-day work? In order to conduct this empirical analysis a total of 104 practitioners were recruited to determine how human factors, misinterpretation, and miscommunication of requirements and decision-making processes play their roles in software success forecasting. We discussed a potential relationship between forecasting of software success or failure and the development processes. We noticed that experienced participants had more confidence in their practices and responded to the questionnaire in this empirical study, and they were more likely to rate software success forecasting linking to the development processes. Our analysis also shows that cognitive bias is the central human factor that negatively affects forecasting of software success rate. The results of this empirical study also validated that requirements’ misinterpretation and miscommunication were the main causes behind software systems’ failure. It has been seen that reliable, relevant, and trustworthy sources of information help in decision-making to predict software systems’ success in the software industry. This empirical study highlights a need for other software practitioners to avoid such bias while working on software projects. Future investigation can be performed to identify the other human factors that may impact software systems’ success.

Introducing Refined Agile Model (Ram) in the Context of Bangladesh's Software Development Environment Concentrating on the Improvement of Requirement Engineering Process

Introducing Refined Agile Model (Ram) in the Context of Bangladesh's Software Development Environment Concentrating on the Improvement of Requirement Engineering Process