The Effects of Human Aspects on the Requirements Engineering Process: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) requires the collaboration of various roles in SE, such as requirements engineers, stakeholders and other developers, and it is thus a very highly human dependent process in software engineering (SE). Identifying how "human aspects" -such as personality, motivation, emotions, communication, gender, culture and geographic distribution -might impact on the RE process would assist us in better supporting successful RE. The main objective of this paper is to systematically review primary studies that have investigated the effects of various human aspects on the RE process. We wanted to identify if any critical human aspects have been found, and what might be the relationships between different human aspects impacting the RE process. A systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted and identified 474 initial primary research studies. These were eventually filtered down to 74 relevant, high-quality primary studies. No primary study to date was found to focus on identifying what are the most influential human aspects on the RE process. Among the studied human aspects, the effects of communication have been considered in many studies of RE. Other human aspects such as personality, motivation and gender have mainly been investigated to date in relation to more general SE studies that include RE as one phase. Findings show that studying more than one human aspect together is beneficial, as this reveals relationships between various human aspects and how they together impact the RE process. However, the majority of these studied combinations of human aspects are unique. From 56.8% of studies that identified the effects of human aspects on RE, 40.5% identified the positive impact, 30.9% negative, 26.2% identified both impacts whereas 2.3% mentioned that there was no impact. This implies that a variety of human aspects positively or negatively affects the RE process and a well-defined theoretical analysis on the effects of different human aspects on RE remains to be defined and practically evaluated. The findings of this SLR help researchers who are investigating the impact of various human aspects on the RE process by identifying well-studied research areas, and highlight new areas that should be focused on in future research.

The Influence of Human Aspects on Requirements Engineering-related Activities: Software Practitioners Perspective

“…4.1 What human aspects influence the performance of the individuals involved in requirements engineering-related activities (RQ1) In the systematic literature review we recently conducted [25], we identified a set of human aspects that researchers have focused on to identify their potential impact on RE-related activities, where the majority of the prior studies were based on academia. By conducting this survey, we wanted to identify the industry perspective on which of these human aspects software practitioners in the industry consider highly important when involved in RE-related activities.…”

“…Emotions (32.4%) and cultural diversity (18.9%) were also rated as moderately important human aspects, where the majority of the participants mentioned gender and age as what they felt were the least important human aspects when carrying out RE-related activities, with percentages of 6.3 and 11.7 respectively. Apart from the given list of human aspects derived from [25], we wanted to know if there are any other human-related aspects that our survey participants consider as important referring to its' influence on RE-related activities. N=33 participants mentioned several other human-related aspects that they consider as important when conducting RE-related activities.…”

“…Hence, with this study, we have identified a set of human aspects that are important to consider when involved in RE, according to software practitioners (Table 4 -Key finding (KF) 3). As motivation and personality are studied in SE but not well investigated in RE [25], we are focusing on these two human aspects in our future studies. Revealing that our current research focus aligns with the perspectives of software practitioners in the industry, motivation and personality were identified as highly important human aspects when involved in RE-related activities.…”

“…Human aspects in software engineering are considered as human-related aspects that can become make-or-break issues in software projects [25]. Researchers have investigated human aspects such as personality [8] [10], emotions [12], motivation [48] [20], gender [42], culture [44], communication issues [15][6], human errors [5], attitude [18], team climate [47] and others in various SE contexts and identified their impact on SE for better or worse.…”

“…Researchers have investigated human aspects such as personality [8] [10], emotions [12], motivation [48] [20], gender [42], culture [44], communication issues [15][6], human errors [5], attitude [18], team climate [47] and others in various SE contexts and identified their impact on SE for better or worse. From the systematic literature review (SLR) we recently conducted [25], we identified that human aspects, and their impact on RE-related activities are still an area with relatively limited attention. The majority of the studies are academic-based, shows the need for more industry-focused studies.…”