Artefact-Based Requirements Engineering Improvement: Learning to Walk in Practice

Abstract

Requirements engineering process improvement (REPI) has gained much attention in research and practice. Most REPI approaches are of solution-driven and activity-based nature. They focus on the assessment of company-specific RE reference models against an external norm of best practices, and they propagate an improvement by forecasting the adaptation of the processes and methods in the RE reference model towards that norm. In recent years, we could develop a first problem-driven RE improvement approach that supports an improvement against individual goals and problems of a company putting primary attention to the quality of the RE artefacts (named ArtREPI). In this short paper, we briefly illustrate our resulting approach and report on our initial experiences from ongoing empirical evaluations in practice. We conclude with a summary of planned next steps.