The state-of-practice in requirements specification: an extended interview study at 12 companies

Requirements specifcation is a core activity in the requirements engineering phase of a software development project. Researchers have contributed extensively to the feld of requirements specifcation, but the extent to which their proposals have been adopted in practice remains unclear. We gathered evidence about the state of practice in requirements specifcation by focussing on the artefacts used in this activity, the application of templates or guidelines, how requirements are structured in the specifcation document, what tools practitioners use to specify requirements, and what challenges they face. We conducted an interview-based survey study involving 24 practitioners from 12 diferent Swedish IT companies. We recorded the interviews and analysed these recordings, primarily by using qualitative methods. Natural language constitutes the main specifcation artefact but is usually accompanied by some other type of instrument. Most requirements specifcations use templates or guidelines, although they seldom follow any fxed standard. Requirements are always structured in the document according to the main functionalities of the system or to project areas or system parts. Diferent types of tools, including MS Ofce tools, are used, either individually or combined, in the compilation of requirements specifcations. We also note that challenges related to the use of natural language (dealing with ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness) are the most frequent challenges that practitioners face in the compilation of requirements specifcations. These fndings are contextualized in terms of demographic factors related to the individual interviewees, the organization they are afliated with, and the project they selected to discuss during our interviews. A number of our fndings have been previously reported in related studies. These fndings show that, in spite of the large number of notations, models and tools proposed from academia for improving requirements specifcation, p
This paper has been funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under project/funding scheme PID2020-117191RB-I00/AEI/.
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