High-Impact Requirements for Software-Intensive Systems: A Manifesto

Despite its undoubted success in the last two decades, requirements engineering needs a better alignment between its research focus and its grounding in practical needs as these needs have changed significantly. We identify and explore changes in the environment, targets, and the process of requirements engineering (RE) that influence the nature of fundamental RE questions. Based on these explorations we propose four key principles that underlie current requirements processes and influence their successful resolution: (1) intertwining of requirements with implementation and organizational contexts, (2) dynamic evolution of requirements, (3) architectures as a critical stabilizing force, and (4) high levels of design complexity and necessity to employ new ways to mitigate it. We make recommendations to refocus the RE research agenda as to meet better emerging and new challenges based on the review and analysis of these four key themes, and note several managerial and practical implications.