Ensuring quality in software requirement engineering process: A comparative study

Poorly managed requirements can lead to a software failure; hence, qualitative Requirement Engineering (RE) is essential for the success of software. Researchers have pointed out numerous ways to aid the RE process. This study aims to find practices deemed fit and unfit for quality improvement of the Software Requirement Engineering (SRE) process from the literature and verify them by software professionals. The study selects 57 articles published in journals and conferences of IEEE Xplore, ScienceDirect, and ACM Digital Library, from 2018 to 2023 to answer three research questions, yielding 8 quality practices. An industrial survey is then formulated to find the trends against those practices from the software industry. The findings from the literature and industrial survey are then compared. The comparison between literature and professional views proved ambiguous requirements to be the top cause of prolonged analysis and project failure. Also, requirement elicitation and analysis are the toughest RE activities. The quality practices pointed out by the literature make a positive difference in the quality of the developmental process of software and, if not followed, result in poorly managed or low-quality software products. Insufficient investment of time in engineering requirements can lead to cost and budget overruns, ultimately culminating in software failure.