Browsing by Author "Mafra, Priscilla"

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    Naming the pain in requirements engineering : contemporary problems, causes, and effects in practice
    (2016) Méndez Fernández, Daniel; Wagner, Stefan; Kalinowski, Marcos; Felderer, Michael; Mafra, Priscilla; Vetrò, Antonio; Conte, Tayana; Christiansson, Marie-Therese; Greer, Desmond; Lassenius, Casper; Männistö, Tomi; Nayabi, Maleknaz; Oivo, Markku; Penzenstadler, Birgit; Pfahl, Dietmar; Prikladnicki, Rafael; Ruhe, Günther; Schekelmann, André; Sen, Sagar; Spinola, Rodrigo; Tuzcu, Ahmet; Vara, Jose Luis de la; Wieringa, Roel
    Requirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research and practice due to its importance to software project success. Its interdisciplinary nature, the dependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline di cult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, to demonstrate which practically relevant RE problems exist and to what extent they matter. Motivated by this situation, we initiated the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative which constitutes a globally distributed, bi-yearly replicated family of surveys on the status quo and problems in practical RE. In this article, we report on the qualitative analysis of data obtained from 228 companies working in 10 countries in various domains and we reveal which contemporary problems practitioners encounter. To this end, we analyse 21 problems derived from the literature with respect to their relevance and criticality in dependency to their context, and we complement this picture with a cause-effect analysis showing the causes and effects surrounding the most critical problems. Our results give us a better understanding of which problems exist and how they manifest themselves in practical environments. Thus, we provide a first step to ground contributions to RE on empirical observations which, until now, were dominated by conventional wisdom only.
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    Towards guidelines for preventing critical requirements engineering problems
    (2016) Mafra, Priscilla; Kalinowski, Marcos; Méndez Ferández, Daniel; Felderer, Michael; Wagner, Stefan
    [Context] Problems in Requirements Engineering (RE) can lead to serious consequences during the software development lifecycle. [Goal] The goal of this paper is to propose empirically-based guidelines that can be used by different types of organisations according to their size (small, medium or large) and process model (agile or plan-driven) to help them in preventing such problems. [Method] We analysed data from a survey on RE problems answered by 228 organisations in 10 different countries. [Results] We identified the most critical RE problems, their causes and mitigation actions, organizing this information by clusters of size and process model. Finally, we analysed the causes and mitigation actions of the critical problems of each cluster to get further insights into how to prevent them. [Conclusions] Based on our results, we suggest preliminary guidelines for preventing critical RE problems in response to context characteristics of the companies.