Mohamed Hassan Kassab

Goals and objectives

Forty years after Requirements Engineering (RE) was acknowledged for the first time as an independent discipline in an issue of the Transactions of Software Engineering, a large portion of everyday industrial practices is still dominated by conventional wisdom rather than governed by empirical evidence. The low practical impact of many of the RE community’s contributions and the disconnect between researchers and practitioners have been a topic of discussion within the RE community. Some projects have succeeded with little or no agreement on requirements. The increasing adoption of Agile practices in software development challenges the need for rigorously describing software requirements upfront, which industry practitioners consider a moving target. Some practical evidence furthermore indicates that specifying requirements can hinder creativity and design because designers become overly preoccupied with the information provided. To this end, and to pave the road for the industrial adoption of RE research contributions, there is a need to close the knowledge gap between the practices in industry and results from research. The key issue in improving RE industrial practices is to first identify the areas that need the most improvement. In this presentation, we present the findings from exploratory studies we conducted on the evolving state of practice of RE.