Multimedia resources as a support for requirements engineering and software maintenance

Abstract

Textual documentations are frequently used in the software development process to outline features and behaviors of an application. For some people, textual descriptions may not be enough to understand what is being developed. In this scenario, multimedia resources appear as an option for software documentation, providing other ways to observe and interpret information. Objective: To identify and characterize the approaches and techniques which promote the use of multimedia in requirements engineering (RE) to support software development and maintenance. Method: A systematic mapping was conducted to find the primary studies in the literature and collect evidence for directing future research. Results: Only 27.66% of the approaches found validated their solutions through controlled experiments, showing the need to increase the use of scientific method in this area, with replications of studies that will allow to evaluating if other researchers independently will come up with the same results. In this context, the approaches/techniques identified were TRECE, MURMER, Wiki System Multimedia, Storytelling, Virtual World Environment, VisionCatcher, PRESTO4U, ReqVidA, CrowdRE, AVW, The Software Cinema Technique, Dolli Project, UTOPIA, and approaches without explicit names, which, as a rule, use multimedia resources as an additional support. Conclusions: There was a favorable consensus regarding the use of multimedia in RE. The selected studies demonstrated to be favorable to the adoption of media to persist and store the requirements of a system. Moreover, multimedia resources can improve the process of understanding the code and decrease evolution and maintenance costs. General terms are design, documentation, experimentation, human factors, multimedia, reliability, software engineering, verification, and security.