Field study on requirements engineering: Investigation of artefacts, project parameters, and execution strategies
This work provides incremental insights for software engineering practitioners to tailor RE processes based on project-specific characteristics.
The study investigated requirements engineering (RE) processes in successful projects to identify artefact patterns and execution strategies, finding no statistically significant differences in efficiency between strategies but showing that many failure-causing parameters can be managed.
Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical discipline mostly driven by uncertainty, since it is influenced by the customer domain or by the development process model used. We aim to investigate RE processes in successful project environments to discover characteristics and strategies that allow us to elaborate RE tailoring approaches in the future. We perform a field study on a set of projects at one company. First, we investigate by content analysis which RE artefacts were produced in each project and to what extent they were produced. Second, we perform qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews to discover project parameters that relate to the produced artefacts. Third, we use cluster analysis to infer artefact patterns and probable RE execution strategies, which are the responses to specific project parameters. Fourth, we investigate by statistical tests the effort spent in each strategy in relation to the effort spent in change requests to evaluate the efficiency of execution strategies. Our results show no statistically significant difference between the efficiency of the strategies. In addition, it turned out that many parameters considered as the main causes for project failures can be successfully handled. Hence, practitioners can apply the artefact patterns and related project parameters to tailor the RE process according to individual project characteristics.