Goal-oriented Improvement of Requirements Processes

Software engineering improvement methodologies offer an organizational framework for goal setting, planning, execution, and monitoring of improvement programs as well as technologies for assessing, modeling, and measuring of processes. These methodologies help in the identification of key practices to be improved, but they do not provide guidance on how to improve a specific practice like the specification of software requirements. In contrast, requirements engineering research and practice offers a wide variety of methods and techniques for specific software requirements practices, but little guidance on how and when to establish them within an organization. In this paper, we introduce the requirements-specific assessment and improvement method RE-KIT-FRAIME. This method bridges the gap between improvement and requirements practices in two ways. It ties the building-up of requirements practices to an overall improvement method and it gives guidance on how to choose and design a particular practice.