A Research Program in Requirements Engineering

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The field of requirements engineering (RE) is one of the most strategic fields in the software engineering domain because it embodies methods, techniques, tools and processes for defining what the system should provide and how the system should behave during its use. There isn't any point in investing much effort in the rest of system development if there are major oversights in a system's requirements. While RE has made significant progress over the last several decades, there are evolving challenges in this field due to changing contexts, technologies, paradigms and the like; thus the quest for on-going improvements in the RE field. ******This proposal therefore seeks to address the following key challenges in the RE field:***(i) Data intensive (or Big Data) end-user applications in different application-domains are steadily growing in number. Yet, in RE, current specification methods do not capture, explicitly, data characteristics of such systems. This is an inhibitor for efficiently creating dependable big data end-user applications.******(ii) Ensuring system's compliance with regulations and standards, especially for large, complex, systems is hitherto arduous, effort-draining, and error prone, during the RE process. Current RE effort-estimation methods for compliance work are ad hoc and are not reliable. This leads to several problems, namely: resource allocation, product quality, reusability, and cycle-time.******This research is important because effective specification methods and effort-estimation methods would reduce the described problems significantly. In turn, this will benefit the users and developers of big data and regulatory compliant systems. Researchers would also benefit because of the contributions to the body of knowledge in the RE field. The anticipated outcomes include novel methods for: specifying quality requirements for big data end-user systems, and estimating the effort needed to carry out regulatory compliance work in RE. With an increasing thrust for knowledge-based economy among Canadian corporations, the outcomes of the proposed research would help in promulgating this movement.