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Designs and documents actionable requirements and artifacts—such as user stories, acceptance criteria, success metrics, business rules, constraints, and prioritized backlog items—by converting stakeholder goals and strategic objectives into clear, implementable specifications. Analyzes commercial impact, feasibility, risks, and trade‑offs to align technical solutions with business objectives and advises stakeholders on prioritization, value, and expected outcomes.
Existing research lacks systematic methods to assess how requirements engineering (RE) impacts downstream development activities, hindering RE process optimization. Method: This paper proposes the first fitness-for-purpose RE impact assessment model, integrating a systematic literature review with multi-source empirical data to identify and structure 24 downstream development activities affected by requirements and 16 quantifiable attributes. Contribution/Results: The model bridges two critical gaps in requirements quality assessment—namely, the “activity dimension” and “measurability of impact”—by enabling empirical analysis of how specific requirements artifacts and processes concretely influence development practices. It provides a theoretically grounded framework and evidence-based decision support for precise, targeted optimization of the RE phase.
This study addresses the challenge of transforming stakeholder requirements into product requirements in software-driven automotive systems. Leveraging a dataset of 8,082 stakeholder requirements and 5,870 product requirements provided by Infineon, the research employs a hybrid methodology integrating structural statistics, decision modeling, traceability mining, textual analysis, and hardware-software linkage to systematically analyze the requirement refinement process. It reveals, for the first time, that requirement complexity primarily stems from ambiguous architectural scope and missing contextual information rather than linguistic redundancy. The work establishes a classification framework for mapping stakeholder to product requirements, identifies systematic differences across abstraction levels, and proposes key improvements in requirement validation, deviation management, and contextual tooling to support efficient and reusable automotive development.
This study addresses the challenge that stakeholders often struggle to articulate their true requirements accurately due to limited domain knowledge or cognitive biases, leading to misalignment between stated needs and underlying intentions. To bridge this gap, the authors propose a user-centered approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to contextually rewrite initial requirements, followed by an iterative human-in-the-loop feedback mechanism for validation and refinement. As the first empirical investigation of its kind, the work demonstrates the efficacy of LLMs as assistive tools in requirements elicitation. In an evaluation involving 130 requirements from 26 participants, LLM-rewritten versions significantly outperformed original statements in intent alignment, readability, logical coherence, and unambiguity, while also uncovering latent requirement details, thereby enhancing both the accuracy and completeness of the requirements gathering process.
This work proposes a systematic approach to derive task effectiveness requirements in the absence of explicit user needs. The method deconstructs task intent into context, functionality, constraints, critical dimensions, performance attributes, and architectural solutions, and introduces a task complexity factor to quantify the impact of external challenges and technology maturity. By integrating Best-Worst Scaling, it prioritizes critical dimensions based on stakeholder judgments. Through task decomposition modeling and quantitative complexity analysis, the framework supports integration with UAF/SysML artifacts and establishes a traceable mechanism for generating Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements. The approach is validated using a close air support mission case study, effectively addressing a critical gap in requirements engineering when clear initial inputs are unavailable.
Software requirements are often implicit in stakeholder interviews, making them difficult to capture explicitly yet critically important for system design. This work proposes LENS, a novel approach that leverages context-aware large language models (LLMs) to jointly extract explicit requirements and infer implicit ones from interview transcripts, while incorporating organizational context to generate traceable user stories. LENS enables unified modeling and traceability of both explicit and implicit requirements. Evaluated on 12 interview transcripts from the cybersecurity domain, the method achieves an F1 score of 84.4% in explicit requirement extraction, and 75% of the inferred implicit requirements were rated by domain experts as practically valuable, demonstrating its potential to support automation and reduce manual analysis effort.
This study addresses the lack of a unified theoretical foundation in traditional requirements engineering (RE) quality assessment, which often fails to integrate artifact- and process-oriented perspectives and overlooks information transmission efficiency. To bridge this gap, the paper proposes a holistic theoretical framework that models RE as a flow of information particles among stakeholders, developers, testers, and artifacts, with information flow as its core construct. Building on this model, the authors develop a simulation system to capture dynamic interactions and information exchanges across roles. The simulation reveals how high-quality requirements specifications can be inadvertently bypassed in agile environments and yields actionable insights for improving RE processes. This work establishes a theoretical basis for optimizing information flow, enhancing RE effectiveness, and understanding the underlying causes of success or failure in requirements engineering practices.
This study addresses the challenges posed by the proliferation, complexity, and expanding scope of regulatory requirements in software engineering, which hinder their systematic integration into development processes. To tackle this issue, the paper proposes a viewpoint-centered, artifact-based approach to regulatory requirements engineering. The approach innovatively integrates viewpoint analysis with artifact modeling to develop the AM4RRE (Artifact Modeling for Regulatory Requirements Engineering) framework, which facilitates cross-functional collaboration and ensures consistency in compliance-driven design. Preliminary validation demonstrates that AM4RRE effectively bridges the gap between organizational regulatory processes and software development practices, enabling a shift from ad hoc compliance responses toward systematic integration. This foundational work paves the way for further empirical investigation into scalable and sustainable regulatory compliance in software engineering.
This study addresses detrimental traits among requirements engineers that impede collaboration and project success. Employing a mixed-methods approach—integrating surveys and semi-structured interviews, complemented by qualitative data analysis and concept mapping—the research systematically identifies 17 critical negative attributes for the first time. These attributes are innovatively categorized into four dimensions: communication, domain knowledge, personality, and technical knowledge, forming a structured and visual conceptual map. The findings not only fill an empirical gap in reflective competence assessment within requirements engineering but also offer practitioners an actionable framework for self-improvement and team capability development.
This study addresses the prevalent ambiguity, inconsistency, and incompleteness in articulating explainability requirements for AI systems due to a lack of standardized specifications. Through a structured literature review and interviews with developers, the authors identify a set of explainability quality attributes, which are then refined via a large-scale survey of practitioners into ten core attributes. For the first time, these attributes are translated into a prioritized, actionable guideline for writing explainability requirements. Building on this foundation, the authors design a lightweight, iterative requirements engineering workflow augmented by a large language model to assist in requirement generation. An accompanying web-based tool reduces average requirement drafting time by 23.5%, and user evaluations indicate that the generated requirements match or slightly exceed manually written ones in terms of implementability and textual quality.