Marginal Notes on Amethodical Requirements Engineering: What Experts Learned from Experience

Abstract

Requirements engineers with many years of experience have a distinct perspective on the field. To sample this knowledge, we interviewed 34 requirements researchers and practitioners, each with up to 42 years of experience. We used open-ended, structured interviews in which we asked them to reflect on their experiences and professional development as requirements engineers over their careers. Several themes emerged: requirements engineers act as bridges between different worlds, good communication is key, good process can help but isn't everything, shorter requirements documents can be better, and good requirements are driven by customer value not technical elegance. All of these pertain to amethodical requirements engineering. Amethodical concepts are not rejections of method, but rather those concepts that are marginalized and left out of prescriptive methods for carrying out a procedure. We discuss these results and their implications.