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_36: In the last years, the field of creativity for requirements engineering has received a growing interest from researchers and practitioners. This paper presents a mapping study to aggregate literature in this field. The motivation is to identify trends and research opportunities in the application of creativity approaches to support the requirements engineering. The mapping study analyzed 46 papers. The results show four main research groups working on creativity in RE. Requirements elicitation is the phase concentrating the majority of studies. The study confirms that creativity techniques enhance creative thinking in requirements activities. However, creative thinking strategies should be fully integrated in current requirements engineering processes, methods and tools.
@cite_26: This paper describes an empirical mapping study, which was designed to identify what aspects of Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) are empirically evaluated, in which context, and by using which research method. On the basis of 46 identified and categorized primary studies, we found that understandability is the most commonly evaluated aspect of SRS, experiments are the most commonly used research method, and the academic environment is where most empirical evaluation takes place.
@cite_20: Software Requirement Specifications (SRS) are a key result of the Requirement Engineering (RE) process and an important basis for every large industrial software development project. Nevertheless, accurate, complete and consistent SRS are still a challenge in practice. Many publications related to SRS address problems and provide solutions for solving these. The most frequently researched SRS problems and improvement methods are listed and referenced in this mapping study. As final result of the search process, publication are analyzed and mapped to each other. This mapping is important for a further evaluations of SRS improvement methods that helps practitioners and researchers to compare those approaches.
@cite_2: This paper reports a systematic review of empirical studies concerning the effectiveness of elicitation techniques, and the subsequent aggregation of empirical evidence gathered from those studies. The most significant results of the aggregation process are as follows: (1) Interviews, preferentially structured, appear to be one of the most effective elicitation techniques; (2) Many techniques often cited in the literature, like card sorting, ranking or thinking aloud, tend to be less effective than interviews; (3) Analyst experience does not appear to be a relevant factor; and (4) The studies conducted have not found the use of intermediate representations during elicitation to have significant positive effects. It should be noted that, as a general rule, the studies from which these results were aggregated have not been replicated, and therefore the above claims cannot be said to be absolutely certain. However, they can be used by researchers as pieces of knowledge to be further investigated and by practitioners in development projects, always taking into account that they are preliminary findings.
There is a large body of research on requirements engineering in general and on specific RE methods in particular. Our study touches on the results of many of them, but we cannot discuss them all here. There exist surprisingly few comprehensive systematic literature reviews. For instance, there is a systematic review on effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques @cite_2 and mapping studies on creativity @cite_36 , requirements specification improvement methods @cite_20 as well as the empirical work on requirements specifications techniques @cite_26 . In the latter, the authors emphasise that most studies are experiments, and that the practitioners' view is missing.