Empirical observations on requirements engineering practices in Palestine

• Main Authors: Zein, Samer, Salleh, Norsaremah, Grundy, John
• Format: Proceeding Paper
• Language: English; English
• Published: IOS Press BV 2023
• Subjects: Q Science (General)
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/109728/7/109728_Empirical%20Observations%20on%20Requirements%20Engineering%20Practices%20in%20Palestine.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/109728/8/109728_Empirical%20Observations%20on%20Requirements%20Engineering%20Practices%20in%20Palestine_Scopus.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/109728/; https://ebooks.iospress.nl/volumearticle/63921

Requirements Engineering (RE) is critical to the success of software development projects. Industrial software projects that apply poor RE practices usually suffer from severe quality challenges and even project failures. Even though RE has been drawing more attention in the literature, there is a lack of empirical evidence of RE practices and challenges at industrial contexts. To address this we carried out a study to evaluate the perspectives of software engineers on their RE practices to understand more about how software engineers approach RE process and what are the challenges they face. We conducted a multi-case study by interviewing 8 participants from 5 software development companies in Palestine. Our results show that for all the RE process seems to be fairly systematic with whole team involvement. Further, the agile RE model is the dominant model, and over half reported that key challenges are caused by issues that originated from the client side. Finally, we highlight interesting future RE research from the perspective of industrial practitioners.