Field Study on Requirements Engineering Artefacts and Patterns

Requirements Engineering (RE) constitutes a critical discipline within Software Engineering. The quality of requirements is the backbone of project execution since the following phases strongly rely on it. Nowadays, industries are more then ever facing the problem that the RE process is highly volatile because it depends on the customer’s capabilities, on the used process models, and on the type of specifications developed. This paper describes a study on the RE process in a specific company in the application domain of business information systems. While existing surveys often analyse the general impact of RE processes on project success, we investigate and discuss different influences that arose in 12 real-life projects and the effects of these influences onto produced RE artefacts. We infer different artefact patterns and probable project execution strategies that cause these patterns. The strategies are performed in order to tackle the different project influences. The identification enables us to get a more detailed understanding of RE in practice for the future elaboration of tailoring approaches that customise RE efforts to volatile project environments.