Requirements Interdependencies: State of the Art and Future Challenges

It is well acknowledged in practice as well as in research that requirements are related to each other and that these relationships affect software development work in various ways. This chapter addresses requirements interdependencies, starting from a traceability perspective. The focus of the chapter is on giving an overview of requirements interdependency research and on synthesizing this into a model of fundamental interdependency types and a research agenda for the area. Furthermore, a description of how knowledge about requirements interdependencies can facilitate various activities within software engineering is provided. The main challenges for the future are to understand the nature of requirements interdependencies and to develop approaches that enable to identify, describe and effectively deal with them in the software development process.

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