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International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality

REFSQ 2020: Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality pp 78–94Cite as

Industrial Practices on Requirements Reuse: An Interview-Based Study

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNPSE,volume 12045)

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Requirements reuse has been proposed as a key asset for requirements engineers to efficiently elicit, validate and document software requirements and, as a consequence, obtain requirements specifications of better quality through more effective engineering processes. [Question/problem] Regardless the impact requirements reuse could have in software projects’ success and efficiency, the requirements engineering community has published very few studies reporting the way in which this activity is conducted in industry. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we present the results of an interview-based study involving 24 IT professionals on whether they reuse requirements or not and how. Some kind of requirements reuse is carried out by the majority of respondents, being organizational and project-related factors the main drivers. Quality requirements are the type most reused. The most common strategy is find-copy-paste-adapt. Respondents agreed that requirements reuse is beneficial, especially for project-related reasons. The most stated challenge to overcome in requirements reuse is related to the domain of the project and the development of a completely new system. [Contribution] With this study, we contribute to the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements by showing how real organizations carry out this process and the factors that influence it.

Keywords

  • Requirements reuse
  • Requirements elicitation
  • Requirements documentation
  • Requirements engineering
  • Survey
  • Interview-based study

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://atlasti.com/.

  2. 2.

    With “quasi-quotes” we mean syntactical adaptations of the sentences to make them fit to the story (e.g., including missing context in the sentence, aligning verb tenses, …).

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partially funded by the Horizon 2020 project OpenReq, which is supported by the European Union under the Grant Nr. 732463.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica Catalunya (UPC-BarcelonaTech), Barcelona, Spain

    Xavier Franch, Cristina Palomares & Carme Quer

Authors
  1. Xavier Franch
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  2. Cristina Palomares
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  3. Carme Quer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xavier Franch .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science, Middlesex College, Western University, London, ON, Canada

    Nazim Madhavji

  2. School of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Liliana Pasquale

  3. Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione “Alessandro Faedo”, Pisa, Italy

    Ph.D. Alessio Ferrari

  4. Area della Ricerca CNR di Pisa, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell'Informazione “Alessandro Faedo”, Pisa, Italy

    Stefania Gnesi

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Franch, X., Palomares, C., Quer, C. (2020). Industrial Practices on Requirements Reuse: An Interview-Based Study. In: Madhavji, N., Pasquale, L., Ferrari, A., Gnesi, S. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12045. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_6

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