Requirement engineering practice research framework for the public service organisation

This paper presents exploratory survey results on Requirements Engineering (RE) practices of some software development companies in Malaysia. The survey attempted to identify patterns of RE practices the companies are implementing. Information required for the survey was obtained through a survey, mailed self-administered questionnaires distributed to project managers and software developers who are working at software development companies operated across the country. The results showed that the overall adoption of the RE practices in these companies is strong. However, the results also indicated that fewer companies in the survey have use appropriate CASE tools or software to support their RE process and practices, define traceability policies and maintain traceability manual in their projects.

This paper describes empirical research into agile requirements engineering (RE) practices. Based on an analysis of data collected in 16 US software development organizations, we identify six agile practices. We also identify seven challenges that are created by the use of these practices. We further analyse how this collection of practices helps mitigate some, while exacerbating other risks in RE. We provide a framework for evaluating the impact and appropriateness of agile RE practices by relating them to RE risks. Two risks that are intractable by agile RE practices emerge from the analysis. First, problems with customer inability and a lack of concurrence among customers significantly impact agile development. Second, risks associated with the neglecting non‐functional requirements such as security and scalability are a serious concern. Developers should carefully evaluate the risk factors in their project environment to understand whether the benefits of agile RE practices outweigh the costs imposed by the challenges.

In order to reduce requirements problems many Requirements Engineering (RE) practices have been suggested [1]. Though there have already been many surveys identifying requirements problems (e.g. [2], [3]), as researchers, we need to be constantly aware of what is really going on in practice and to understand what RE practices are perceived to be useful by practitioners. This will enable us to position our research within an appropriate context [4]. It is important to discover which practices will benefit an organization, as research has shown that effective RE practices provide multiple benefits including help in keeping delivery times and product quality under control [1; 5].

CONTXEXT:-Success of any Software depends on the successful implementation of all of the Requirements. The paper is about successful implementation of requirement engineering (RE) practices in the context of global software development (GSD)., OBJECTIVE: — Development of requirement implementation model (RIM) which can address the challenges and success factors in successful implementation of the requirements elicited through efficient RE practices. METHOD: — Systematic literature review (SLR) and empirical research study will be used for the aforesaid objective. SLR is based on a planned protocol and is more thorough and systematic than ordinary literature survey., EXPECTED OUTCOMES: — The expected results of this, study will be RIM that will help vendor organizations for better elicitation, analysing, specifying, manage and validate requirements.

Many of the requirements engineering (RE) difficulties have been argued to be due to the evolving nature of design problems in dynamic environments, characterized by high levels of uncertainty, ambiguity and emergence. It has also been argued that these challenges cannot be solved by focusing primarily on notations, tools, and methods. The purpose of this vision paper is to understand better what kinds of new competencies are needed when expanding RE practices to cope with complex systems in dynamic environments. We intend to achieve our goal by discussing: 1) how increased complexity affects RE practices, and 2) what viewpoints have been found most salient when aligning RE practices with the design problem at hand. Based on our findings, we argue for the importance of contextual intelligence, the ability to recognize and diagnose contextual factors and then intentionally and intuitively adjust behavior. We also outline some of the important competencies that need to be developed for future RE practitioners to deal with complex problems.

Context. The increasing focus on well-being, aging, and health (WBAH) is impacting various fields, including Requirements Engineering (RE). This is particularly relevant, as RE involves defining, documenting, and managing software system requirements to ensure that developed systems effectively address user needs. However, there remains a limited understanding of how RE practices can be tailored to create WBAH-centric systems. Aims. This study aims to explore the current landscape of RE practices used in the development of software systems that support WBAH. Method. We conducted a systematic mapping study, analyzing articles from reputable conferences and journals. Results. Our review identified 57 articles published between 2013 and 2024 that examine RE efforts related to specifying and documenting WBAH systems. The predominant topics discussed include usability and evaluation techniques, elicitation and modeling methods, security and privacy concerns for healthcare applications, and the adaptation of RE for specific populations, such as the elderly. Conclusion. This study highlights significant knowledge gaps that present opportunities for further investigation by RE researchers.

As agile methods become more pervasive, agile practices are applied to more large-scale systems with a scope that goes beyond pure software. The expansion of agile in these contexts provides benefits, but creates new challenges. Widespread use of agile has changed the way we must think about practices both in Requirements Engineering (RE) and in System Testing (ST). Our experience shows that many challenges in the application of large-scale agile development relate to either RE or ST, and in particular to the alignment between these areas. In this paper we present large-scale agile-related challenges from a multiple case study which relate to REST alignment. We map our challenges to an existing framework for REST alignment, and make an initial attempt to suggest agile RE practices from the literature which may alleviate these challenges. Our results show that the interviewed companies need to first adopt more agile RE practices to enhance REST alignment and then leverage agile testing. Future work will look more towards evaluating these best practices.

Requirements engineering (RE) deals with the software requirements elicitation, validation and verification processes and implementation of elicited requirements. The RE process, for value-based software (VBS) development, is one of the highly complex and non-linear processes which mainly depends on the key stakeholders. VBS systems are extremely different from traditional systems due to their association with financial streams. There is a need of value-based RE practices. Stakeholders' analysis plays a vital role in the selection of critical stakeholders for RE phase in VBS development. Different stakeholders' identification and quantification (SIQ) approaches are presented by researchers in order to identify and quantify the stakeholders. The existing approaches are not uniform in terms of process activities and different stakeholders' attributes. Non-uniformity results in higher time consumption and higher complexity. The existing SIQ approaches are not suitable for current value-based RE practices. Hence, this research presents an intelligent decision support system for the VBS SIQP using stakeholder metrics and fuzzy logic. The data is finally divided into three clusters in order to select the highly prioritized stakeholders for VBS systems.

This paper identifies the essential components of a requirements engineering (RE) process and provides alternatives to the requirements analyst when deciding on a particular set of RE methods. Existing methods of choosing RE techniques are discussed, and a new technique is proposed specifically for choosing RE techniques for projects with critical time-to-market projects. The components of the essential RE process as well as many other insights into the practice of RE were identified by examining the current literature and by analyzing the data from 25 completed surveys concerning the area of RE. The survey data provides insight into the state of the practice in requirements engineering.

[Background] Prior research on the professional occupation of Requirements Engineering (RE) in Europe and Latin America indicated incongruities between RE practice as perceived by industry and as in textbooks, and conducted detailed analysis of both RE and non-RE job aspects. Relatively little is published on the RE competencies and skills industry expects, and seldom investigated the application domains calling for RE professionals. [Aims] We felt motivated by those findings to carry out research on RE job posts in a North-American market. Especially, we focused solely on RE-specific tasks, competencies and skills, from the perspective of defined position categories. Plus, we intend to explore the application domains in need for RE professionals to reveal the wide range of RE roles in industry. [Methods] Coding process, analysis, and synthesis were applied to the textual descriptions of the 190 RE job ads from Canada's most popular online job search site, especially to the text referring to tasks and competencies. [Results] We contribute to the empirical analysis of RE jobs, by providing insights from Canada's IT market in 2017. Using 109 RE job ads from the most popular IT job search portal T-Net, we identified the qualifications, experience and skills demanded by Canadian employers. Furthermore, we explored the distribution of those RE tasks and competences over the 11 categories of RE roles. [Conclusions] Our results suggest that the majority of the employers were big to very big companies in 29 business domains, and the most in-demand RE skills for them were related to RE methods and to project management aspects affecting requirements. In addition, employers placed much more emphasis on experience - both RE-specific and broad software engineering experience, than on higher education.

Requirements Engineering (RE) has grown from its humble beginnings to embrace a wide variety of techniques, drawn from many disciplines, and the diversity of tasks currently performed under the label of RE has grown beyond that encom-passed by software development. We briefly review how RE has evolved and observe that RE is now a collection of best practices for pragmatic, outcome-focused critical thinking-A pplicable to any domain. We discuss an alternative perspective on, and de-scription of, the discipline of RE and advocate for the evolution of RE toward a discipline that supports the application of RE prac-tice to any domain. We call upon RE practitioners to proactively engage in alternative domains and call upon researchers that adopt practices from other domains to actively engage with their inspiring domains. For both, we ask that they report upon their experience so that we can continue to expand RE frontiers. © 2017 IEEE.

 Abstract—This paper explains the roles of key IT Personnel during the development of the Software Requirement Specification (SRS) in the Malaysian Public Sector. We determine the flow of the SRS procedure through the interview process to nine of IT Manager in Malaysian Public Sector. They explain their experience during requirement gathering in IT Project. Our purpose is to standardize their roles and responsibility as a guideline during our software project development. We diagram their experience to be easier understood by IT Personnel. The process flow contents of activity which blends with RE process. We have done the refining using Delphi Technique to the IT Expert in Malaysian Public Sector. We hope that the team will produce the structured SRS for as their guideline for complete the software project development.

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.

Empirical studies have demonstrated that requirements errors introduced during software development are most numerous in the software life-cycle, making software requirements critical determinants of software quality. This article reports an exploratory study which provides insight into industrial practices with respect to requirements engineering (RE). A combination of both qualitative and quantitative data is collected, using semi-structured interviews and a detailed questionnaire from 28 software projects in 16 Australian companies. The contribution of this RE study is threefold: Firstly, it includes a detailed examination of the characteristics of the RE activities involved in the projects. Secondly, it reconstructs the underlying practiced process models. Thirdly, it compares these models to one another and with a number of well-known process models from RE literature to give insight into the gap between RE theory and practice.

Software development requires intensive communication between the requirements engineers and software stakeholders, particularly during the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase. Therefore, the individuals' culture might influence both the RE process and the result. Our aims are to investigate the extend of cultural influences on the RE process, and to analyze how the RE process can be adapted to take into account cultural aspects. The model we present is based on Hofstede's cultural theory. The model was applied on a pilot case study in the context of the conservative Saudi Arabian culture. The results reveal 6 RE aspects and 10 cultural factors that have a large impact on the RE practice.