Requirements Engineering Model (REM): An Assessment Model for Software Vendor Organizations

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is important phase of software development life cycle. Among different RE phases include, requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, requirements specification, requirements validation, and requirements management. There is essential need of an assessment model where software organization can measure their level of capability to implement requirements engineering. Besides so much advances in this field, there is no such assessment model where organizations can find their level of maturity towards requirements engineering process. In this research, requirements engineering model (REM) is designed and implemented via case studies from different software organizations. For designing REM, literature review of different models was conducted, and levels of REM were finalized. In the first phase, success factors of successful software requirements implementation were identified via systematic literature review (SLR). Furthermore, the identified CSFs are organized into five levels based on Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Software Outsourcing Vendors' Readiness Model (SOVRM). Using Motorola assessment technique, REM was evaluated via case studies from different software organizations. As a result of SLR, total of 50 success factors from different phases of requirements engineering were identified from 191 papers and then mapped to five levels of REM. Three case studies were conducted from different companies to evaluate REM. The outcome analysis of case studies shows that different organizations are on different maturity levels of requirements implementation.