A Program of Research in Requirements Engineering

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Canadian organisations are increasingly embracing the requirements engineering (RE) discipline in developing software intensive systems. The proposed research addresses several critical areas of RE that need improvement, namely: compliance, lessons learnt, and conflicts. In the area of compliance, this proposal seeks to investigate into: (a) the effort required for ensuring compliance of requirements with regulations and (b) self-checking the compliance of a system against regulations. In the area of lessons learnt, this proposal seeks to investigate into technologies that would enable requirements analysts to: easily capture, share and reuse lessons learnt from projects. In the area of conflicts, this proposal seeks to investigate into the impact of conflicts rooted in RE on software quality and development processes. This research is important because the anticipated outcomes would help in the improvement of RE processes. The key stakeholders who should be interested in this research include: project planners, organisations concerned about the compliance of their systems and services, requirements analysts, and technology developers. We anticipate the following outcomes from this research: a model for estimating the effort needed to ensure that project requirements comply with regulations; tool-support for proactively self-checking, against regulations, the compliance of business operations; maps depicting strong and weak areas of concentration of lessons learnt in the field of requirements engineering; grass-roots technological support for requirements engineers to capture, share and reuse lessons learnt; knowledge on conflicts and their impact on requirements, system architecture, project risks, development costs, and others. The pursued research goals are novel and so the anticipated outcomes would add to the scientific and engineering body of knowledge. Also, Canadian organisations would be able to improve their RE processes through: improved effort-estimates of compliance work; systematic way of checking system compliance; increased and systematic reuse of lessons learnt from grass-roots experience; and improved knowledge of conflicts rooted in RE.