Research Directions in Requirements Engineering

Abstract

This paper reviews the current state of the art of requirements engineering (RE) research and identifies RE research challenges for future systems. First, the paper overviews the highlights of RE research over the past two decades; the research is considered with respect to requirements technologie, including notations and methodologies, developed to address specific RE tasks, such as elicitation, modeling, and analysis. Such a review enables us to identify mature areas of research, as well as areas that warrant further investigation. Next, we identify several research challenges posed by emerging systems for the future. In order to help delineate the scope of future RE research directions, we then identify several strategies for performing RE research. (The spectrum of research strategies ranges from empirical research to paradigm shifts.) Finally, within the context of these RE research strategies, we identify "hot areas" of research that address RE needs for emerging systems of the future.

Global Software Engineering: The Future of Socio-technical Coordination

“…Requirements elicitation and communication presents several specific challenges in the GSD context [21,23] -indeed, Cheng and Atlee consider globalization to be one of the major research challenges in requirements engineering [14]. A global context makes it more difficult to seek out and to integrate the necessary knowledge.…”

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

“…In addition to functional attributes, quality attributes are also very crucial to the success of software projects [3]. Further studies may also focus on incomplete quality-attributes-related requirements.…”

“…Requirements elicitation is composed of activities that enable understanding the goals, objectives, and motives for building a proposed system [3]. 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].…”

“…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].…”

Towards an Approach for Stakeholder-Oriented Elicitation and Identification of Concerns in EA

“…Structural patterns aid this derivation process. The design of ASTEAM is compatible to the ISO 42010 standard [7] and based on goal-oriented requirements modeling (GORM) and goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) [8][9][10].…”