Towards an Integrated Approach to Requirement Engineering

Requirements Engineering (RE) still constitutes the Achilles' heel of the entire software development activities. Even worse, there is a considerable gap between the state of the art in academic RE and in industrial RE. Although many academic RE approaches exhibit a high potential in practical application, they are not applied in practice. This report demonstrates that a set of approaches developed at the Technische Universitat Munchen can be integrated into one approach that covers most RE tasks. The aim of this integrated approach is to provide a comprehensive RE framework. In industrial practice, RE is influenced by a plethora of stakeholders. This makes it difficult to address the needs of every stakeholder and not loosing the big picture. The presented artefact-oriented approach provides a guideline that defines what should be specified so that the resulting set of requirements is as complete as possible. The approach is supported by adequate modeling techniques required to achieve the objectives of consistency and completeness in requirements specifications. The approach includes both general technical tasks, as proper writing of requirements documents or transition from requirements to design, and methodical issues, as structuring of requirements artefacts.