Requirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research and practice due to its importance to software project success. Its interdisciplinary nature, the dependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline difficult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, to demonstrate which practically relevant RE problems exist and to what extent they matter. Motivated by this situation, we initiated the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative which constitutes a globally distributed, bi-yearly replicated family of surveys on the status quo and problems in practical RE. In this article, we report on the qualitative analysis of data obtained from 228 companies working in 10 countries in various domains and we reveal which contemporary problems practitioners encounter. To this end, we analyse 21 problems derived from the literature with respect to their relevance and criticality in dependency to their context, and we complement this picture with a cause-effect analysis showing the causes and effects surrounding the most critical problems. Our results give us a better understanding of which problems exist and how they manifest themselves in practical environments. Thus, we provide a first step to ground contributions to RE on empirical observations which, until now, were dominated by conventional wisdom only.
@cite_38: 
@cite_31: [Context] Many software projects fail due to problems in requirements engineering (RE). [Objective] The goal of this paper is to gather information on relevant RE problems and to represent knowledge on their most common causes. [Method] We replicated a global family of RE surveys in the Brazil and used the data to identify critical RE problems and to build probabilistic cause-effect diagrams to represent knowledge on their common causes. [Results] The survey was answered by 74 different organizations, including small, medium and very large sized companies, conducting both, plan-driven and agile development. The most critical RE problems, according to those organizations, are related to communication and to incomplete or underspecified requirements. We provide the full probabilistic cause-effect diagrams with knowledge on common causes of the most critical identified RE problems online. [Conclusion] We believe that the knowledge presented in the diagrams can be helpful to support organizations in conducting causal analysis sessions by providing an initial understanding on what usually causes critical RE problems.
@cite_3: Defect causal analysis (DCA) is a means of product focused software process improvement. A systematic literature review to identify the DCA state of the art has been undertaken. The systematic review gathered unbiased knowledge and evidence and identified opportunities for further investigation. Moreover, some guidance on how to efficiently implement DCA in software organizations could be elaborated. This paper describes the initial concept of the DBPI (Defect Based Process Improvement) approach. It represents a DCA based approach for process improvement, designed considering the results of the systematic review and the obtained guidance. Its main contributions are tailoring support for DCA based process improvement and addressing an identified opportunity for further investigation by integrating organizational learning mechanisms regarding cause-effect relations into the conduct of DCA.
In @cite_31 , we used the Brazilian data to explore how to analyse problems and causes in RE in detail. In particular, we tested the use of on this data to better understand the relationship of causes and problems. We introduced those diagrams for causal analysis purposes @cite_3 , and have further detailed them subsequently @cite_38 . We decided to employ these diagrams in our subsequent efforts, including this article, in which we use them for analysing causes and effects of problems based on the complete data set.