Requirements Engineering
The Vision: Requirements Engineering in Society
Guenther Ruhe, Maleknaz Nayebi
SEDS Laboratory
University of Calgary
Email: {ruhe,mnayebi}@ucalgary.ca
Christof Ebert
Vector Consulting Services
Stuttgart, Germany
Christof.Ebert@vector.com
I. 25 YEARS OF RE: REFLECTING A CHANGING WORLD
Industry and society are facing radical changes due to fast
growing digital technologies and its ubiquity [7], [8]. Products
and services will increasingly augment and integrate the real
world with the digital world. This digital transformation has
reached all business areas. Companies and consumers expect
to obtain innovation, market penetration, cost reductions and
more flexibility.
The first Requirement Engineering (RE) paper in IEEE
Software journal was published on verifying and validating
software requirements by Barry Boehm in 1984 [3]. Starting
from 1990, requirements attracted increasing attention and the term was very frequent among IEEE Software papers.
Besides quantity, the content and emphasis of RE papers
have changed over years. We no longer are just fascinated
by a RE technology without looking “behind the scenes”. An
increasing number of research studies look into impacts on
society and industries [6]. In the 21ˆst century, computational
power, storage (memory), and communication capacity are in
the hands of every online person in the society. While this
brings the opportunity of using crowd and cloud computations,
it also implies the responsibility of improving the quality of life in our society, and not limiting the discipline to address exclusively business-driven problems.
The relationship between RE and society is bi-directional.
In this talk, we discuss the evolving role of RE by referring
to a quarter century of impressive research. We discuss the
increasing scope and responsibility of our discipline, serving
as the bridge between the general public and technical teams
and providing a response to the dramatic changes in our
society. The vision is that we not only study possible options to
perform requirements engineering in socio-technical systems,
but get closer to make the results happen and evaluate their
actual impact.
II. CHANGING REQUIREMENTS DECISIONS
RE is a decision-centric discipline [2] with consumers,
users, organizations being key stakeholders in it. New tech-
nologies such as mobile and wearable devices create a satellite
data. Analyzing user communities, forums [4], social media
[12], and app stores [17], provides a broad range of infor-
mation that supports all types of requirements decisions. Not
considering this satellite data for requirement decision making
makes our developed software applications less helpful and de-
sirable for general public. Extracting information from tweets
about a wildfire emergency situation showed that existing
wildfire mobile apps cover only 15% of essential features
requested by the general public [21].
What’s being decided? Requirements engineering will remain a decision-centric process, but the way decisions are
made, the information they rely upon, and the people and
stakeholder involved in the process will further change [18].
Analyzing social media to elicit the software requirements
is a contemporary example. MAPFEAT [21] is a method to
automatically transfer general purpose tweets (for example
about wildfire) into software features by searching for user
needs in mobile app stores.
How the decisions are made? We are moving from intuition to evidence. Daneva et al. considered the pathway
of empirical RE research analyzed from a series of EmpiRE
workshops [5]. RE involves numerous decision problems that
now should be extended toward involving the general pub-
lic. There is increasing emphasis on evidence as studied in
empirical RE. More powerful embedded systems and mobile
devices provide situational and personal data from the general
public [14]. These all enable software engineers to move from
intuition to evidence. The analysis of app store reviews and
social media is a prominent example of relying on extracted
facts rather than gut feeling. In a recent study, we proved
that information combined from social media and app stores
provides essential and complementary support for RE decision
making [20].
Who makes the decisions? The importance of user and stakeholder involvement for project success has been analyzed
by various authors [1]. Crowdsourcing is increasingly being
discussed to enlarge the set of stakeholders and to elicit
and manage requirements. Workshops like CrowdRE were
designed to address the role of the crowd in RE. Social media
and other communication channels allow almost unlimited
access participating in the decision-making processes.
III. RE FOR SOCIETY: THE ROAD AHEAD
Software has a tremendous impact on society, and so does
RE. Not understanding needs, markets and trends will ruin
companies, but even entire countries, as we currently see when
looking at the world map. Requirements engineering is the key
lever to keep focus on what matters. We have asked decision
makers worldwide to identify such trends [9]. In the sequel,
we briefly outline selected trends, intended to show the breadth
and diversity of society themes impacted by RE.
2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference
2332-6441/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/RE.2017.70
478
2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference
2332-6441/17 $31.00 © 2017 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/RE.2017.70
478
RE for safety-critical systems: There is no business if IT systems are perceived as insecure or even unsafe. Governments
and companies are equally worried about today poor state
of IT protection. Autonomous vehicles as well as connected
medical systems are not trusted as long as there is no proven
safety – which of course depends on cyber-security. Security
RE, and more widely speaking correctly addressing quality
requirements is pivotal across industries [7], [9], [19].
RE for digital health and aging society: Traditional re- quirement analysis is now replaced by careful understanding of
users in social media. 19% of Twitter users and 56% of internet
users older than 65 years old use Facebook. Understanding
and investigating on their attitude and stated needs in a form
of social media status by mining social media over time will
support decisions for technology design [11], [16].
RE for smart things and cities: The Internet of Things, cyber-physical systems, and the trend towards digitalization
have become the main source of new business opportunities.
Robots cooperate with human workers; high-speed trains are
flexibly configured according to volatile mobility demands,
and smart grids self-manage demand and response of energy.
Requirements to such systems are very different from what
we are used to in the – limited – worlds of Apps, IT systems
and embedded systems, as they connect these three areas.
Future RE has to specify and model connectivity, distribution,
flexibility, self-adaptation, and the usage of massive amounts
of data [10], [19], [9].
RE for collaboration: Development and operations of large and ultra-large software-driven systems converges and
needs a continuous RE. Continuous evolution of such systems
demands modeling dependencies and risk on performance,
safety, and availability. Failure is not an option for such
systems. Resilience thus is a core requirement, often with
decades of continuous operation. Collaborative tools facilitate
the necessary flexibility. They also allow new eco-systems
such as for pen innovation [9], [13].
RE for innovation: RE together with product management helps to balance cost and effort and thus maintain a sustainable
business. Innovation drives all companies and social economy.
RE provides the framework for innovative products and the
innovation pipeline. A good example is the current conver-
gence of IT with many traditional business models. This digital
transformation is moving products to connected services [9],
[13], [15].
IV. DISCUSSION
A little rebellion now and then is a good thing, as Thomas
Jefferson once remarked. Do we need a new RE? Not to our
point of view. But we need to better position RE at the center
of all engineering disciplines and application domains. RE not
only has to be addressed across study programs but also needs
a stronger emphasis in companies and society. Times are gone
when RE was only about specifications, tools, and modeling.
RE in society creates new challenges along the value, human
engagement and enabling processes.
This talk is inteded to intrigue discussion about how RE as
a discipline is impacted by the digital transformation – and
how requirements engineering will help societies succeed in
their digital innovations and transformations. Considering the
changes in RE decision process we discuss (but not limit the
discussion) to value (elicitation of value to evoke knowledge, user needs, and business rationales), human interactions (visualization, usability and human factors in RE), resilience (business continuity and risk mitigation, e.g., in case of cyber-
attacks), and dependencies (user experience across consistent services) for better RE for better society.
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