Requirements engineering for crossover services: Issues, challenges and research directions

Abstract

Crossover services involve deep convergence of services in different domains. Requirements analysis of crossover services often requires the collaboration of engineers in different domains and various organizations. The industry has a demand for sophisticated requirements engineering (RE) methods to address challenges brought by crossover and convergence. However, many methods proposed by researchers have not been widely used in the industry, and the reason is that these methods provide technological solutions to the problems and challenges that may not be considered accurate or even real by practitioners in the crossover services industry. A great effort is needed to explore what needs, expectations, and constraints that RE approaches must satisfy and promote the adoption of novel RE approaches in the crossover services industry. The authors have conducted an industrial study to gain an in-depth understanding of practitioners' needs concerning RE research and method development. The study involved qualitative interviews as well as questionnaires to collect data. The objective of this study is to investigate issues, challenges, and practices of crossover services RE from practitioners' perspectives and to reveal potential guidelines for researchers and tools developers. Findings from five aspects of RE methods are reported and some research directions for future crossover services RE research are provided.Despite the advantages of crossover services, enterprises still face huge challenges when migrating to crossover services. Crossover services involve the coordination of multipleThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

The Use of NLP-Based Text Representation Techniques to Support Requirement Engineering Tasks: A Systematic Mapping Review

“…3) More adaptive syntactic processing Many studies have concluded that there is a gap between RE tasks automation research and its implementation undertaken in industrial and real-life projects [147]- [149]. This gap is more obvious in the case of rule-based approaches since they usually need the requirements to be represented based on specific templates [150]; hence, their success strongly depends on the consistency of the requirements with the predefined templates [114], [150].…”

“…These situations are common in real-life projects when it is hard to control requirements authoring environments, especially in large development projects, or when one has little control over the requirements authoring environments. [12], [114], [147]- [151]. One of the potential future research directions is working on more adaptive approaches which can be more flexible when handling requirements, such as identifying the syntactic structures automatically and building more adaptive approaches based on the dynamically identified structure.…”

The Use of NLP-Based Text Representation Techniques to Support Requirement Engineering Tasks: A Systematic Mapping Review

“…Many studies have concluded that there is a gap between RE tasks automation research and its implementation undertaken in industrial and real-life projects [147,148,149]. This gap is more obvious in the case of rule-based approaches since they usually need the requirements to be represented based on specific templates [150]; hence, their success strongly depends on the consistency of the requirements with the predefined templates [114,150].…”

“…These situations are common in real-life projects when it is hard to control requirements authoring environments, especially in large development projects, or when one has little control over the requirements authoring environments. [114,151,147,148,149,150,12]. One of the potential future research directions is working on more adaptive approaches which can be more flexible when handling requirements, such as identifying the syntactic structures automatically and building more adaptive approaches based on the dynamically identified structure.…”

An Experimental Study on Checklist-Based and Perspective-Based Requirements Reading Techniques Using E-Review Tool

“…The importance of Requirements Engineering (RE) in software development has been mentioned in many works of literature including in Gregory, [8], Hidellaarachchi et al, [10], Liu et al, [13] Wiecher et al, [26]. In general, the generic RE activities are requirements elicitation, analysis and modelling, negotiation, validation, documentation, and management.…”