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Assisted Requirements Engineering - What Will Remain in the Hands of the Future Requirements Engineer? (Invited Keynote)

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Software Quality: Future Perspectives on Software Engineering Quality (SWQD 2021)

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Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is widely considered one of the most difficult and risky activities in software and systems engineering. Since RE requires communication, and despite other ideas and experiments, tasks around textual content remains at the center of the RE for most projects. With a daily evolving field of natural language processing (NLP), the question is: Which of these tasks will - independent from any technological and methodological advancements - stay in the hands of the requirements engineer and which tasks will be automated?

This paper will take a look into the crystal ball. Based on analogies from programming and autonomous driving, and based on an analysis of the abilities of NLP and abilities of other modern technologies, I present a vision of the life of a future requirements engineer.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Artificial intelligence is the science and engineering of making computers behave in ways that, until recently, we thought required human intelligence.” [13].

  2. 2.

    Please note that these are challenges in the sense that in individual cases you can still overcome the challenge but in the very most situations the solution will be inherently incomplete or imprecise.

  3. 3.

    Please note that, due to the other abilities, this model no longer needs to be written in a human-readable language.

  4. 4.

    Note that here the role of a RE is not passive consumption and documentation of information, but the very active role of a digital designer, c.f. [17] (in German).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Daniel Mendez and Jannik Fischbach for their feedback and opinion on the ideas as well as early drafts of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Qualicen GmbH, München, Germany

    Henning Femmer

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  1. Henning Femmer
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Correspondence to Henning Femmer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Dietmar Winkler

  2. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Stefan Biffl

  3. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden

    Daniel Mendez

  4. Johannes Kepler University Linz, Linz, Austria

    Manuel Wimmer

  5. Software Quality Lab GmbH, Linz, Austria

    Johannes Bergsmann

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Femmer, H. (2021). Assisted Requirements Engineering - What Will Remain in the Hands of the Future Requirements Engineer? (Invited Keynote). In: Winkler, D., Biffl, S., Mendez, D., Wimmer, M., Bergsmann, J. (eds) Software Quality: Future Perspectives on Software Engineering Quality. SWQD 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65854-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65854-0_1

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