The Influence of Human Aspects on Requirements Engineering: Software Practitioners Perspective

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a process that requires high collaboration between various roles in software engineering (SE), such as requirements engineers, stakeholders, developers, etc. Their demographics, views, understanding of technologies, working styles, communication and collaboration capabilities make RE highly human dependent. Identifying how such "human aspects"– such as motivation, domain knowledge, communication skills, personality, emotions, culture, etc– might impact RE would help us to improve the RE activities and SE in general. The aim of this study is to understand current industry perspectives on the influence of human aspects on RE. We surveyed 111 software practitioners involved in RE activities, and our findings show that 86.4% of participants agree, that the success of RE greatly depends on the people involved in it. Software practitioners consider motivation, domain knowledge, attitude, communication skills and personality as highly important human aspects when involved in RE. A set of factors, we categorize as human/social and technical, were identified as software practitioners’ motivation factors when involved in RE activities, where the majority of are motivated due to human/social factors. Furthermore, our findings suggest that software practitioners’ personality characteristics should also be paid more attention to as they are important when conducting RE effectively.