Special Seminar: Stefan Wagner "Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering"

2018-04-09 13:00:00 2018-04-09 14:00:00 Europe/Helsinki Special Seminar: Stefan Wagner "Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering" Department of Computer Science http://old.cs.aalto.fi/en/midcom-permalink-1e82e71c86e2f382e7111e8a7d86ba8a72bf1f1f1f1 Maarintie 8, 02150, Espoo

Department of Computer Science

09.04.2018 / 13:00 - 14:00
room TU3, Maarintie 8, 02150, Espoo, FI

Monday 9.4.2018 at 13:00 in TU3, Maarintie 8

Stefan Wagner

Title: Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering

Abstract:

Software Requirements Engineering 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 difficult 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.

This talk describes overall, theory-guided design of the study as well as quantitative and qualitative results of the last run of the survey with data from 228 companies working in 10 countries in various domains. It gives insights into what are common ways of doing requirements engineering as well as 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.

The results give us a concrete picture of requirements engineering in practice, what are interesting areas to improve and also directions for impactful research.