Requirement Engineering and the Role of Design Thinking

Recently, interest in the use of Design Thinking (DT) has been on the rise as a field to study related to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Companies today are seeking innovation and user-centricity in the software development projects regardless of the field they are in. Companies like IBM and SAP among others have taken steps forward to innovate their software development processes using Design Thinking, by creating academies and innovation labs. DT is used as a method to improve the User Experience (UX) while interacting with a computer software. Requirement Engineering (RE) is a process of defining, documenting and maintaining requirements in the system design and software engineering process, while RE takes on the initial phase in software engineering. This position paper reviews the practices of RE as well as how DT could have a role to mitigate the challenges that RE could have.