Viewpoint: effectiveness of focused mentoring to improve requirements engineering industrial practice

Abstract

Requirements engineering practice in industry is often encumbered by practical limits of time, resource, and attention. In our environment, most requirements authors have had no formal training in the practice, yet are expected to produce high-quality specifications that drive subsequent work. Authors are often unaware of different techniques for requirements specification and are rarely equipped to navigate all of the techniques and tools that are potentially available to them, to the extent that they are even aware of the various options. A small cadre of coaches, providing focused, just-in-time mentoring of authors in a handful of basic techniques can increase the proficiency of these authors, who in turn produce higher-quality requirements specifications. From this foundation, authors may be able to later adopt additional techniques to further improve the quality and maturity of their work, thus resulting in improved work products built on the basis of those specifications.