pre-sales

Designs and prepares the technical sales artifacts and activities that translate customer requirements into viable product or solution configurations—e.g., solution architectures, demos, proofs‑of‑concept, technical proposals, and RFP responses. Builds and analyzes deployment options, performance and cost estimates, and technical risk mitigations to address customer objections and coordinate requirements between sales, engineering, and product teams.

pre-sales

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0.15
Oct 01, 2026Oct 01, 2026
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$188K/year
Oct 01, 2026Oct 01, 2026

Must-Read Papers

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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.

adaptive methodmission complexitymission effectiveness

Exploring the Use of LLMs for Requirements Specification in an IT Consulting Company

Jul 25, 2025
LP
Liliana Pasquale
🏛️ University College Dublin | University of Bari "A. Moro" | Polytechnic of Bari

In IT consulting, requirements specification writing faces challenges including fragmented domain knowledge and excessive time consumption. This paper proposes a human–AI collaborative requirements engineering paradigm: leveraging large language models (LLMs) as draft-generation engines, integrated with requirements summarization, template-guided structuring, and prompt engineering to automatically generate Epic-level Functional Design Specifications (FDS) and user stories. Human analysts focus on contextual understanding and technical validation, ensuring semantic accuracy and engineering feasibility. Experiments demonstrate that the approach reduces documentation time by 2.3× on average and cuts human effort by ~40%. Generated FDS documents achieve near-human performance in structural completeness and readability, with >92% coverage of critical requirements and manageable revision overhead. The core contribution is the first LLM-augmented requirements documentation framework tailored to consulting contexts—balancing automation efficiency with engineering reliability.

Addressing fragmented knowledge sources for efficient FDS generationAutomating requirements specification using LLMs in IT consultingBalancing LLM automation with human oversight for quality RE

Towards Industrial-scale Product Configuration

Mar 26, 2025
JB
Joachim Baumeister
🏛️ denkbares | University of Wurzburg | University of Potsdam | Potassco Solutions | UP Transfer

The increasing diversity and complexity of product configuration requirements in mass customization pose significant challenges for evaluating and advancing configuration technologies. Method: This paper introduces COOM Suite—the first structured, scalable benchmarking framework for product configuration—built upon the COOM modeling language. It comprises a hierarchical product model benchmark suite featuring three representative configuration fragment types: foundational, combinatorial, and constraint-intensive. A bicycle serves as an illustrative pedagogical example, complemented by extensible industrial-scale models. We propose a novel fragment-wise evaluation paradigm that jointly optimizes expressive power and solving efficiency, enabling seamless integration of multi-paradigm Answer Set Programming (ASP) solvers. Contribution/Results: The open-source COOM Suite significantly enhances modeling consistency, solving reproducibility, and industrial standardization. It provides a verifiable, comparable, and extensible benchmark infrastructure to rigorously assess and advance configuration technologies.

Addressing product configuration for diverse customer demandsDeveloping ASP-based workflow for configuration solutionsProviding scalable product models in COOM language

What is a Feature, Really? Toward a Unified Understanding Across SE Disciplines

Feb 14, 2025
NP
Nitish Patkar
🏛️ University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) | University of Fribourg | University of Bern

Inconsistent definitions of “feature” across software engineering domains—particularly requirements engineering (RE) and software product lines (SPL)—impede communication, trigger rework, and reduce cross-team collaboration efficiency. Method: We conducted an empirical study across 27 mainstream open-source projects, integrating repository mining, branch behavior analysis, qualitative coding, and pattern induction to derive a data-driven, cross-disciplinary definition of feature. Contribution/Results: This work introduces the first empirically grounded, unified feature definition framework bridging RE and SPL. It identifies recurring collaboration patterns and critical bottlenecks in feature description, implementation, and management, and proposes a roadmap linking academic theory with industrial practice. The findings yield actionable guidelines for project planning, resource allocation, and inter-team coordination, advancing feature conceptual standardization and engineering practice optimization.

Address communication gaps and inefficienciesImprove project planning and coordinationUnify feature understanding across SE disciplines

Measuring the Fitness-for-Purpose of Requirements: An initial Model of Activities and Attributes

May 16, 2024
JF
Julian Frattini
🏛️ Blekinge Institute of Technology | Netlight Consulting GmbH | fortiss GmbH

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.

OptimizationRequirement EngineeringSoftware Development

Latest Papers

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Traditional revenue forecasting approaches struggle to uncover the underlying customer behavioral drivers—such as customer acquisition, repeat purchase rates, and average transaction value—that influence revenue dynamics. To address this limitation, this work proposes the Customer-Based Multi-Task Transformer (CBMT), which uniquely integrates multi-task learning with a Transformer architecture to jointly model customer behavioral metrics and total revenue through shared representations. Furthermore, CBMT incorporates a downstream alignment mechanism to enhance both interpretability and predictive accuracy. Empirical evaluation on real-world customer transaction panel data demonstrates that CBMT outperforms existing methods across 23 out of 24 evaluation metrics, achieving a 30% reduction in total sales prediction error compared to the strongest baseline and significantly surpassing single-task models employed by 74.3% of firms.

coordinated forecastingcustomer-base driversforecast accuracy

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.

automotive industryproduct requirementsrequirement engineering

This study addresses the limited understanding of how practitioners actually develop software engineering (SE) agents, particularly the lack of systematic investigation into the evolution of development workflows and core challenges. Through semi-structured interviews with 20 practitioners complemented by a survey of 80 respondents, this work proposes the first seven-stage workflow for SE agent development, revealing a paradigm shift toward “evaluation-driven iteration.” The research identifies that bottlenecks have moved beyond coding to non-coding tasks such as requirement specification, cross-role coordination, review, and deployment. It systematically characterizes six key challenges—including unreliable evaluation signals, accumulating comprehension debt, and behavioral drift induced by model updates—and synthesizes corresponding practical mitigation strategies.

agent development challengesevaluation-driven developmentLLM-based agents

This work addresses the challenges of low quality and poor transparency in build-or-buy decisions within enterprise software development, which often stem from reliance on unstructured experiential knowledge. To overcome these limitations—particularly in cold-start scenarios lacking historical data—the authors propose a structured approach that integrates a decision-factor ontology, rule-based reasoning, and reference-class matching. This method enables transparent, auditable evaluation of alternatives and represents the first application of combined ontology modeling and rule reasoning to build-or-buy decision-making. By revealing critical decision thresholds and supporting traceability, the approach enhances the rationality, transparency, and auditability of choices. Its practical efficacy is demonstrated through a lightweight tool validated in a financial industry case study, showing significant improvements in decision quality.

build-vs-buydecision supportenterprise software