Practitioners’ Perspectives towards Requirements Engineering: A Survey

Abstract

In this paper, we discuss the results of our survey among 84 practitioners in order to understand practitioners’ perspectives towards requirements engineering. We asked 28 questions to learn the practitioners’ motivations, the techniques and technologies used for different activities, practitioners’ experiences with customer involvement, and any challenges encountered. Some important results are as follows: the practitioners’ top motivations are the precise communication of requirements and analyzing the requirements to detect issues. Most practitioners (i) insist on using natural languages, (ii) specify requirements as the use case and scenario descriptions, (iii) neglect using/transforming requirements for making high-level decisions and reasoning about requirements, (iv) neglect the specifications of quality requirements and their reasoning while considering quality requirements important, and (v) neglect any technologies for facilitating requirements engineering (e.g., meta-modeling technologies, formal verification tools, and advanced tools). Practitioners are challenged by the cost and effort spent in specifying requirements, the omissions of errors, misinterpretations of requirements and their incorrect (manual) transformations, and customers’ lack of technical knowledge. With the survey results, practitioners can gain an awareness on the general perspectives, academics can trigger new research addressing the observed issues, and tool vendors can improve their tools with regard to the weaknesses determined.