Impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the requirement engineering process in small development projects: A case study

Requirement engineering (RE) is crucial for any software development project. It plays a vital role in the development lifecycle, as it lays the foundation for all subsequent development steps. Ensuring proper collection of project requirements makes the subsequent process, including design, development and testing, easier. The software industry has paid great attention to RE, including tools and techniques, starting with requirement elicitation. In the last couple of years, the Covid-19 pandemic has impacted processes, as meeting clients and stakeholders face-to-face and visiting them in their workplace has been made more difficult by social distancing, changing the techniques for requirement elicitation. Most software development companies rely on distant communication and alternative approaches to collect customers’ requirements to understand their needs, so they can reflect the reality in the work and try to persuade the customers that the developed solution meets their requirements. This study presents a case study of three educational projects at three different universities with different development requirements. The study compares the process before and during the pandemic to identify the challenges and features of the shift which occurred and measure its impact on number of requirements completed in both periods, as well as its impact on development project resources. This study's findings indicate increased requirements during the elicitation process and changes in human resources because of eliminating the practitioners over distance communication during the Covid-19 pandemic.