Identifying factors in requirements engineering phase and impact thereof on software development phase :

Abstract

Requirements engineering is an important stage of the software development life cycle. All other phases of development lifecycle are depending on that. Especially the development phase is based on the requirements and therefore requirements should be clearly understood and properly documented. There can be several factors which should be considered within the requirements engineering phase. In this research through the literature review, it has been identified four major factors; they are communication, inadequate/incomplete requirements engineering, requirements prioritization, and requirements documentation. Based on the identified factors, a separate questionnaire has been developed for requirements engineers and software engineers. The questionnaire for requirements engineers is measuring how they are effectively using those factors within the requirements engineering phase and the questionnaire for software engineers is measuring how much impact is there for software development phase by those factors. With the information gathered, the Straussian grounded theory has been used to analyze the data and the final outcome shows that those factors are highly effective in the requirements engineering phase and impacts to the development phase as well.