“Do you have Time for a Quick Call?”: Exploring Remote and Hybrid Requirements Engineering Practices and Challenges in Industry
Ze Shi Li, Delina Ly, Lukas Nagel, Nowshin Nawar Arony, Daniela Damian · 2024
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift away from co-located work arrangements towards working from home, practitioners encountered many collabora-tive and coordination challenges. While companies are slowly moving back towards in-person arrangements, many employers have permanently adopted fully remote and hybrid work modes. However, the work modes are more blurred, as hybrid work makes coordinating the requirements engineering practices that rely on rich interactions more challenging. Therefore, gaining more understanding of RE challenges and practices from prac-titioners transitioning to the new modes of work is imperative to identify insights that can be useful for organizations shifting to hybrid and remote work. In this paper, we use a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into remote and hybrid requirements engineering practices and challenges in the industry. Through interviews with 12 industry practitioners and a survey with 49 practitioners, we report on 7 adopted practices and 7 challenges encountered in these work arrangements. We found challenges such as organizing co-located tasks, lack of interpersonal con-nections, keeping everyone in the loop, and engagement barriers, which fall under coordination, communication and collaboration. To offset such challenges, we provide 20 recommendations based on our findings, such as proactive planning and using newer tools that support comprehensive tracking of important knowl-edge for requirements documentation. Our findings suggest that practitioners are facing challenges in remote and hybrid work arrangements, which they are mitigating with various strategies. Nonetheless, there remains a need for further research, as not all challenges are equally addressed across different work contexts.