Understanding what industry wants from requirements engineers

Abstract

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 experienceboth RE-specific and broad software engineering experience, than on higher education. CCS CONCEPTS• Software and its engineering → Requirements analysis KEYWORDSRequirements engineering practice; RE job market; requirements engineer; RE career; job ad; exploratory study.

What Industry Wants from Requirements Engineers in China?

“…In the RE and Information Systems Research literature, some researchers explored personal factors demanded in job markets, such as age [2] and educational background [5,15]. Whereas, several studies investigated RE tasks and skills by analyzing job ads in region-specific job markets: Germany [10], the Netherlands [5], Mexico and Brazil [4], and Canada [15]. Each provided empirical region-specific data on this topic.…”

“…RQ1: In China's job market, what job titles are set up for RE roles? As indicated in [5,10,15], there was no RE position titled as 'requirements engineer'. Instead, lots of job titles, such as 'business analyst', 'software developer', 'project director' were used for RE professionals.…”

“…Specifically, we explored what RE professional knowledge and skills were demanded from job seekers. Unlike previous works which analyzed both RE/non-RE professional qualifications and personal educational/working experience of job seekers [5,10,15], our exploratory study: (1) focuses solely on RE and non-RE tasks and skills wanted in China's IT job market; (2) maps the RE tasks identified from job ads to the categories of RE activities in order to explore the mapping between RE qualifications demanded in practice and RE knowledge obtained from textbooks; and (3) compares the findings in China's IT job market to those in Canada on the same topic (our 2017 study in [15]), in order to identify the difference as well as the trend of RE demands in practice.…”

“…In industry, however, RE practitioners are used to creating their own RE-related tasks and skills not only reflecting their specific understanding on RE roles, but also the demands of specific businesses. As collectively concluded in empirical studies on the RE occupation in various countries and geographic regions [4,5,10,15], there is an incongruity between RE practices in industry and in RE textbooks. Furthermore, the perspectives that RE professional job descriptions take on the RE roles have both similarities and differences across countries and regions.…”

“…Furthermore, the perspectives that RE professional job descriptions take on the RE roles have both similarities and differences across countries and regions. For example, the published studies [4,5,10,15] collectively reported that RE positions titled 'Requirements Engineer' did not exist in Europe [5,10], South America [4], and North America [11,15]. Whereas, similar RE tasks and competencies were identified from the RE job ads in the job markets in Germany [10] and the Netherlands [5].…”