Software Practitioners Challenges in the Requirement Engineering Phase of Software Development
2019
Software practitioners have always stressed upon the importance of having a dedicated formal Requirement Engineering (RE) stage in software development.Research has found that RE stage is among those factors that contribute towards project success.Decomposition of this stage in terms of elicitation, analysis, modeling and specification are well defined, but yet software developers claim they face issues as regards to the establishment of proper structural components during the RE stage.Project failures have often been associated with poor requirement definition where the practitioners approach to problem arising during RE phase has been criticised.Ensuring proper interaction among team members and maintaining good communication channel with clients have always been enlisted of being of prime importance in promoting project success in the RE phase.However, findings were mainly based on conventional wisdom.There is still lack of empirical evidence in terms of the identification of other factors that influenced the smooth running of the RE phase.This study aims at identifying the problems faced by practitioners in the RE phase through empirical evidence.An analysis of the influential factors with respect to the criticality for project successes is made.Assessment of the relevance of these factors according to length of projects and size of organisations are also made.A survey questionnaire was designed for identifying the problems faced by practitioners in the RE phase and their frequency of occurrences according to length of project were assessed.The questionnaire was administered to software developers at small, medium and large software enterprises.Semistructured interviews were also conducted with practitioners who have long years of experience as project leaders.Findings reveal that besides communication flaws there are other influential factors that hinder successful completion of the RE phase."Ti me boxing", "Insufficient support from customer" and "from own management", "Gray areas in requirements" are among the hindering factors that make the RE phase vulnerable.Besides, it has been observed that there is uniformity across organisations.Small, medium and large development firms face similar issues as regards to the factors that affect the RE phase.