Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don't Know?

This chapter presents research progress in Requirements Engineering (RE) for enterprise systems (ES) with a view to formulating current challenges and a promising research agenda for the future. In the field of ES, many RE approaches have been launched and tried out in the past decade, however most of them are over-expensive and their effectiveness is unpredictable. Our goal in this chapter is to make an inventory of the approaches discussed in literature, to evaluate the quality of evidence available regarding whether these approaches actually worked, and to identify promising directions for future RE research efforts. Our results indicate (i) that while there are significant achievements, the primary goal of RE for ES is only partly achieved and (ii) that the field is likely to remain very challenging due to the increasingly more pronounced cross-organizational aspects of RE in ES projects (e.g. cross-organizational coordination, trust). At the same time, the need for practical, efficient and effective RE approaches will grow as the importance of ES in today’s extended enterprises is growing.