Crossing Disciplinary Borders to Improve Requirements Communication

Abstract

AbstractSoftware requirements specifications (SRS) serve as an important source of information for a variety of roles involved in software engineering (SE) projects. This situation poses a challenge to requirements engineers: Different information needs have to be addressed, which are strongly dependent on the particular role(s) that SRS stakeholders have within a project. This chapter summarizes the contributions of a thesis that aimed to address and reduce role-specific defects in SRS that negatively influence the efficient usage and acceptance of these documents. To achieve this goal, we collected empirical data about role-specific information needs in a series of empirical studies that served as a baseline for a secondary analysis toward the definition of role-specific views. Moreover, we realized a proof-of-concept implementation that is capable of generating role-specific views on SRS. The results of a case study revealed that role-specific views have the potential to efficiently support SRS consumers during the analysis of a given SRS. Besides conducting further empirical studies in industry, future work aims to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and requirements communication, especially in agile teams. Thereby, we are exploring synergy potential with best practices from non-SE disciplines.