Towards improving requirements engineering processes: prioritizing requirements engineering process problems for elimination

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a process for determining stakeholder needs during the development of a software intensive system. RE process quality influences the quality of software produced due to its critical role in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This places significant importance on continuous Requirements Engineering Process Improvement (REPI). RE processes can be improved by eliminating process problems (causes) that effect poor quality requirements. Unfortunately, however, in a real-life medium or large project, the causes may be large in number, and they may have complex relationships with each other making random selection and elimination of causes inefficient and ineffective. We attempt to address this issue by a strategy to prioritize the causes such that REPI is formal and aligned against organizational goals to achieve the maximum benefit for the given resources. A large software organization that is collaborating with us in this research project has accepted this strategy for their REPI.