Why Requirements Engineering Fails: A Survey Report from China

Abstract

Requirements engineering has gained growing attention in both academia and industry, as today's software intensive systems are expected to provide highly user-centric functions and qualities. Thus, it is important to understand under what situations existing requirements engineering practice is not working well. Continuing our probe into the industrial practices status quo, this paper reports the results from a recent survey of requirements practices in China in 2009. The web-based survey of requirements engineering practices focuses on requirements elicitation techniques, requirements representation techniques. Although purporting to report on the state-of-the-art of requirements engineering in China, it is likely to portray the state-of-the-art of RE worldwide as well.

A study on the software requirements elicitation issues - its causes and effects

“…RQ1. What are the issues reported in literature on RE? Brief grouping was identified for ease of documentation: 1) Change-related: management and political rules [7,61], acceptance criteria changes [7], unstable requirements [67], changes in nature of requirements overtime [74], user needs and understanding changes [52] 2) Communication-related: articulation related [63,24,67] ,u naware of needs [63,24,8,40,74], mis-understanding amongst stakeholders [63,3], verbal and presentation skill [61,67], requirements-related [2,61,67], culture and perspective related [8, 9,33], language barriers [8, 65], change related [43] 7) Scope-related: scope ill-defined [25,31,30,8,59], overscoping [14] 8) Stakeholder-related: user-partIcIpation [46,42], stakeholder [25,22,33,74,16,37,56,50,41,69,59,8], staffmg [61,...…”

Quintessence of Traditional and Agile Requirement Engineering

“…Remarkable variances are found in the process of carrying out RE activities in Agile methods when compared and contrasted to Waterfall methods. The traditional RE is facing many a challenges such as communication gaps, over scoping, requirement prioritization, validation and customer involvement [45]. These issues are resolved by Agile practices such as face to face communication for minimizing documentation and communication gaps, gradual detailing of requirements for reducing over scoping, requirement prioritization by customer based on the worth of business to deal with requirements validation and close interaction on the part of team and customer in order to avoid lack of customer participation [46].…”

A Survey on Identifying and Addressing Business Analysis Problems

“…Solemon et al [36] describe a survey on problems and practices of the software industry in Malaysia. Liu et al [25] conducted a survey in Chinese companies to determine problems and other contributing factors responsible for projects' failures. Mendez Fernandez et al [28] who surveyed German and Brazilian software companies, uncovered a number of RE problems, their causes and analyzed differences between those two countries.…”