05 Fakultät Informatik, Elektrotechnik und Informationstechnik

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/6

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Publication Type: search.filters.UBSTyp.ZeitschriftenartikelAuthor: search.filters.author.Kalinowski, Marcos

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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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    Status quo in requirements engineering: a theory and a global family of surveys
    (2019) Wagner, Stefan; Méndez Fernández, Daniel; Felderer, Michael; Vetrò, Antonio; Kalinowski, Marcos; Wieringa, Roel; Pfahl, Dietmar; Conte, Tayana; Christiansson, Marie-Therese; Greer, Desmond; Lassenius, Casper; Männistö, Tomi; Nayebi, Maleknaz; Oivo, Markku; Penzenstadler, Birgit; Prikladnicki, Rafael; Ruhe, Guenther; Schekelmann, André; Sen, Sagar; Spínola, Rodrigo; Tuzcu, Ahmed; Vara, Jose Luis de la; Winkler, Dieter
    Requirements Engineering (RE) has established itself as a software engineering discipline over the past decades. While researchers have been investigating the RE discipline with a plethora of empirical studies, attempts to systematically derive an empirical theory in context of the RE discipline have just recently been started. However, such a theory is needed if we are to define and motivate guidance in performing high quality RE research and practice. We aim at providing an empirical and externally valid foundation for a theory of RE practice, which helps software engineers establish effective and efficient RE processes in a problem-driven manner. We designed a survey instrument and an engineer-focused theory that was first piloted in Germany and, after making substantial modifications, has now been replicated in 10 countries worldwide. We have a theory in the form of a set of propositions inferred from our experiences and available studies, as well as the results from our pilot study in Germany. We evaluate the propositions with bootstrapped confidence intervals and derive potential explanations for the propositions. In this article, we report on the design of the family of surveys, its underlying theory, and the full results obtained from the replication studies conducted in 10 countries with participants from 228 organisations. Our results represent a substantial step forward towards developing an empirical theory of RE practice. The results reveal, for example, that there are no strong differences between organisations in different countries and regions, that interviews, facilitated meetings and prototyping are the most used elicitation techniques, that requirements are often documented textually, that traces between requirements and code or design documents are common, that requirements specifications themselves are rarely changed and that requirements engineering (process) improvement endeavours are mostly internally driven. Our study establishes a theory that can be used as starting point for many further studies for more detailed investigations. Practitioners can use the results as theory-supported guidance on selecting suitable RE methods and techniques.