Systematic reviews in requirements engineering: A tertiary study

© 2014 IEEE. There has been an increasing interest in conducting Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) among Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers in recent years. However, so far there have been no tertiary studies conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of these published SLR in RE. In this paper we present a tertiary study of SLR that focus solely on RE related topics by following the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. We have conducted both automated search of major online sources and manual search of the RE and SLR related conferences and journals. Our tertiary study has identified 53 distinct systematic reviews published from 2006 to 2014 and reported in 64 publications. We have assessed the resulting SLR for their quality, and coverage of specific RE related topics thus identifying some gaps. We have observed that the quality of SLR in RE has been decreasing over the recent years. There is a strong need to replicate some of these SLR to increase the reliability of their results for future RE research

What makes service oriented requirements engineering challenging? A qualitative study

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognised in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in requirements engineering (RE). The objective of this study is to investigate these challenges of Service Oriented RE (SORE) from practitioners' perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the related issues and to reveal potential gaps between research and practice in SORE. They present a qualitative study of the challenges and issues in SORE. The data were collected by conducting interviews with practitioners working in IT companies in Sydney, who have had substantial experience with service oriented software projects. The authors findings reveal that most of the challenges of SORE are similar to those that are faced during RE in traditional or component-based software development. According to the practitioners, the research and practice has made some advances in the technical direction but the human related issues in SORE have not been addressed adequately. © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014

A guideline for requirements management in GitHub with lean approach

GitHub is an online platform for collaborating and sharing code. In recent years its popularity has increased widely and both people and different size organizations utilize its powerful features. One of those features is a lightweight issue tracker which is meant for handling features and identified errors of software. The issue tracker is intuitive to use and simplifies a lot of things, but what if it is to be used as a requirements management tool? Requirements management is the last step of requirements engineering process. This process aims to identify, document and manage all the requirements valid for the software product. Requirements management focuses on tracking how requirements are fulfilled and keeping the information associated to requirements intact. This M.Sc. Thesis represents a semi-formal guideline for handling requirements management in GitHub. The guideline is evaluated on a theoretical level by comparing how well it accomplishes requirements management objectives and fits in an agile software development environment. To assess the suitability for the agile approach, the guideline is compared against lean principles. Lean principles originate from Toyota’s successful manufacturing practices and are converted to usable form in a software development. On a practical level a case study is carried out where the guideline is put into a real use. Similar research hasn’t been done before, making the results novel. Both the theoretical assessment and the practical case study point out that the guideline and GitHub are well-suited for requirements management in an agile environment

preliminary results of a systematic review on requirements evolution

Background: Software systems must evolve in order to adapt in a timely fashion to the rapid changes of stakeholder needs, technologies, business environment and society regulations. Numerous studies have shown that cost, schedule or defect density of a software project may escalate as the requirements evolve. Requirements evolution management has become one important topic in requirements engineering research. Aim: To depict a holistic state-of-the-art of requirement evolution management. Method: We undertook a systematic review on requirements evolution management. Results: 125 relevant studies were identified and reviewed. This paper reports the preliminary results from this review: (1) the terminology and definition of requirements evolution; (2) fourteen key activities in requirements evolution management; (3) twenty-eight metrics of requirements evolution for three measurement goals. Conclusions: Requirements evolution is a process of continuous change of requirements in a certain direction. Most existing studies focus on how to deal with evolution after it happens. In the future, more research attention on exploring the evolution laws and predicting evolution is encouraged.Background: Software systems must evolve in order to adapt in a timely fashion to the rapid changes of stakeholder needs, technologies, business environment and society regulations. Numerous studies have shown that cost, schedule or defect density of a software project may escalate as the requirements evolve. Requirements evolution management has become one important topic in requirements engineering research. Aim: To depict a holistic state-of-the-art of requirement evolution management. Method: We undertook a systematic review on requirements evolution management. Results: 125 relevant studies were identified and reviewed. This paper reports the preliminary results from this review: (1) the terminology and definition of requirements evolution; (2) fourteen key activities in requirements evolution management; (3) twenty-eight metrics of requirements evolution for three measurement goals. Conclusions: Requirements evolution is a process of continuous change of requirements in a certain direction. Most existing studies focus on how to deal with evolution after it happens. In the future, more research attention on exploring the evolution laws and predicting evolution is encouraged

Preliminary results of a systematic review on requirements evolution

Abstract-Background: Software systems must evolve in order to adapt in a timely fashion to the rapid changes of stakeholder needs, technologies, business environment and society regulations. Numerous studies have shown that cost, schedule or defect density of a software project may escalate as the requirements evolve. Requirements evolution management has become one important topic in requirements engineering research. Aim: To depict a holistic state-of-the-art of requirement evolution management. Method: We undertook a systematic review on requirements evolution management. Results: 125 relevant studies were identified and reviewed. This paper reports the preliminary results from this review: (1) the terminology and definition of requirements evolution; (2) fourteen key activities in requirements evolution management; (3) twenty-eight metrics of requirements evolution for three measurement goals. Conclusions: Requirements evolution is a process of continuous change of requirements in a certain direction. Most existing studies focus on how to deal with evolution after it happens. In the future, more research attention on exploring the evolution laws and predicting evolution is encouraged