Perspectives on Requirements Understandability -- For Whom Does the Teacher's Bell Toll?

Abstract

Software development decision makers use many different information sources as a basis for their decisions. One of these sources is the requirements specification, which is used in a large number of processes throughout the software development cycle. In order to make good decisions, the quality and completeness of the available information is important. Hence, requirements must be written in a way that is understandable for the different decision makers. However, requirements are rarely written with an explicit perception of how to make them understandable for different target usages. In this study we investigate the implicit assumptions of current and future requirements engineers and their teachers regarding which usages they perceive as most important when creating requirements. This is contrasted with industrial viewpoints of the relative importance of different requirements usages. The results indicate that the teachers and future requirements engineers have a strong focus towards in-project perspectives, and very little in common with the perspectives of industry managers. Thus, we are training students to serve as software developers, and not software engineering managers.