Title
Naming the pain in requirements engineering
Abstract
AbstractRequirements Engineering (RE) has received much attention in research and practice due to its importance to software project success. Its interdisciplinary nature, the dependency to the customer, and its inherent uncertainty still render the discipline difficult to investigate. This results in a lack of empirical data. These are necessary, however, to demonstrate which practically relevant RE problems exist and to what extent they matter. Motivated by this situation, we initiated the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE) initiative which constitutes a globally distributed, bi-yearly replicated family of surveys on the status quo and problems in practical RE. In this article, we report on the qualitative analysis of data obtained from 228 companies working in 10 countries in various domains and we reveal which contemporary problems practitioners encounter. To this end, we analyse 21 problems derived from the literature with respect to their relevance and criticality in dependency to their context, and we complement this picture with a cause-effect analysis showing the causes and effects surrounding the most critical problems. Our results give us a better understanding of which problems exist and how they manifest themselves in practical environments. Thus, we provide a first step to ground contributions to RE on empirical observations which, until now, were dominated by conventional wisdom only.
Year
DOI
Venue
2017
10.1007/s10664-016-9451-7
Periodicals
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Requirements engineering,Survey research
Journal
22
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
5
1382-3256
14
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.76
0
23
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Daniel Méndez Fernández131234.66
Stefan Wagner210929.08
Marcos Kalinowski3667.13
Michael Felderer453878.87
Priscilla Mafra5140.76
Antonio Vetro630220.28
Tayana Conte746981.13
Marie-therese Christiansson8232.37
Des Greer9162.50
Casper Lassenius1094264.31
Tomi Männistö1152794.17
M. Nayabi12140.76
Markku Oivo1365081.11
Birgit Penzenstadler1447959.36
Dietmar Pfahl151078106.14
Rafael Prikladnicki1684086.35
Günther Ruhe1792597.84
André Schekelmann18140.76
S. Sen19140.76
Rodrigo O. Spínola2016018.01
Ahmet Tuzcu21292.21
Jose Luis De La Vara2225924.02
Roel Wieringa231698229.81