Requirements engineering: making the connection between the software developer and customer

Are software engineers' responses to incomplete requirements related to project characteristics?

“…Software requirements engineering (RE) is defined as all the activities denoted to identify user requirements to drive additional requirements, document the requirements as a specification, and validate the documented requirements against the actual user needs [8]. The goal of RE is to assure that an effective and high-quality product is defined and developed from the stakeholders' point of view [11,24].…”

“…Ways to perform successful RE activities were studied [1,2,8,12] and many different techniques and approaches related to elicitation were determined [7,21,17,25].…”

“…Betterquality requirements can be developed when they are generated by ongoing client interaction, with a constantly improving prototype to reduce ambiguity [16,22,22]. Users must be carefully listened to and implicit assumptions must never be made [8], as they are not shared by stakeholders and thus may increase the uncertainty of the requirements [5,15].…”

“…Unfortunately, not all succeed. Deficient and lowquality requirements may be the major reason for software project failures [3,4,7,8,14,21,23]. Software requirements quality is related to correctness, unambiguity, completeness, consistency, ranking, verifiability, modifiability, and traceability [9,13].…”

“…Complete and correct requirements specifications are required for developers to know what to build and for users to know what to expect [8,21]. This study aims to determine possible relationships between software engineers' tendencies to make explicit assumptions and project characteristics.…”