Requirements Engineering Problems and Practices in Software Companies: An Industrial Survey

This paper presents about a study conducted to investigate the current state of Requirements Engineering (RE) problems and practices amongst the software development companies in Malaysia. The main objective of the study is to determine areas in RE process that should be addressed in future research in order to improve the process. Information required for the study was obtained through a survey, questionnaires distributed to project managers and software developers who are working at various software development companies in the country. Results show that software companies in this study are still facing great challenges in getting their requirements right due to organizational and technical factors. Also, we found out that high-maturity ratings do not generally correlate better performance and do not indicate effective, high-maturity practices especially to the RE practices. The findings imply that we must consider both human and technical problems, with extra care should be given to the technical issues and all the RE practices in our future research which is to rebuild a specialized RE process improvement model.