Browsing by Author "Spinola, Rodrigo"

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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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    Naming the pain in requirements engineering: comparing practices in Brazil and Germany
    (2015) Méndez Fernández, Daniel; Wagner, Stefan; Kalinowski, Marcos; Schekelmann, André; Tuzcu, Ahmet; Conte, Tayana; Spinola, Rodrigo; Prikladnicki, Rafael
    As part of the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative, researchers compared problems that companies in Brazil and Germany encountered during requirements engineering (RE). The key takeaway was that in RE, human interaction is necessary for eliciting and specifying high-quality requirements, regardless of country, project type, or company size.
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    Preventing incomplete/hidden requirements: reflections on survey data from Austria and Brazil
    (2015) Kalinowski, Marcos; Felderer, Michael; Conte, Tayana; Spinola, Rodrigo; Prikladnicki, Rafael; Winkler, Dietmar; Méndez Fernández, Daniel; Wagner, Stefan
    [Context] Many software projects fail due to problems in requirements engineering (RE). [Goal] The goal of this paper is analyzing a specific and relevant RE problem in detail: incomplete/hidden requirements. [Method] We replicated a global family of RE surveys with representatives of software organizations in Austria and Brazil. We used the data to (a) characterize the criticality of the selected RE problem, and to (b) analyze the reported main causes and mitigation actions. Based on the analysis, we discuss how to prevent the problem. [Results] The survey includes 14 different organizations in Austria and 74 in Brazil, including small, medium and large sized companies, conducting both, plan-driven and agile development processes. Respondents from both countries cited the incomplete/hidden requirements problem as one of the most critical RE problems. We identified and graphically represented the main causes and documented solution options to address these causes. Further, we compiled a list of reported mitigation actions. [Conclusions] From a practical point of view, this paper provides further insights into common causes of incomplete/hidden requirements and on how to prevent this problem.