Challenges in Market-Driven Requirements Engineering - an Industrial Interview Study

Requirements engineering for commercial off-the-shelf software packages entails special challenges. This paper presents preliminary results from an empirical study investigating these challenges through a qualitative approach using semi-structured interviews. The survey is exploratory with the objective of eliciting relevant topics for further research. Seven employees at five software companies with a market-driven development focus were interviewed. The areas of interest include process-related issues on release planning, requirements quality and decision support, as well as artefact-related issues regarding requirements as discrete entities and their representation. The paper also contains a characterization of each company, regarding aspects such as products, processes and customers. A number of challenging issues were elicited, including communication gaps between marketing and development, the problem of balancing the influence between marketing and development on requirements decisions, as well as the limited value of monolithic requirements specifications and the problem of requirements overloading. (Less)

[1]  Prodromos D. Chatzoglou,et al.  Factors affecting completion of the requirements capture stage of projects with different characteristics , 1997, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[2]  Franz Lehner,et al.  Requirements Engineering as a Success Factor in Software Projects , 2001, IEEE Softw..

[3]  Colin Potts,et al.  Invented requirements and imagined customers: requirements engineering for off-the-shelf software , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'95).

[4]  Martin Höst,et al.  Exploring bottlenecks in market-driven requirements management processes with discrete event simulation , 2001, J. Syst. Softw..

[5]  Pete Sawyer,et al.  Packaged Software: Challenges for RE , 2000 .

[6]  Khaled El Emam,et al.  A field study of requirements engineering practices in information systems development , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'95).

[7]  Bill Curtis,et al.  A field study of the software design process for large systems , 1988, CACM.

[8]  Eric C. Honour.  7.1.3 PRINCIPLES OF COMMERCIAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING , 1995 .

[9]  K. Beck,et al.  Extreme Programming Explained , 2002 .

[10]  Björn Regnell,et al.  An industrial survey of requirements interdependencies in software product release planning , 2001, Proceedings Fifth IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering.

[11]  Heikki Kälviäinen,et al.  A State-of-the-Practice Survey on Requirements Engineering in Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises , 2000 .

[12]  Erran Carmel,et al.  A process model for packaged software development , 1995 .

[13]  Charles Richter,et al.  A review of the state of the practice in requirements modeling , 1993, [1993] Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering.

[14]  Pär Carlshamre,et al.  A usability perspective on requirements engineering : from methodology to product development , 2001 .

[15]  Matthias Jarke,et al.  Scenarios in System Development: Current Practice , 1998, IEEE Softw..

[16]  Austen Rainer,et al.  Requirements problems in twelve software companies: an empirical analysis , 2002, IEE Proc. Softw..