Software Process Assessment & Improvement in Industrial Requirements Engineering

The lack of an adequate requirements specification is often blamed for the failure of many IT investments. Naturally, the requirements specification is the product of a requirements engineering process. Methods are required to evaluate the current requirements engineering process and identify where improvements are necessary making it possible to produce requirement specifications of high quality. Existing requirements engineering evaluation methods are often large, costly and time-consuming to use. Therefore we introduce a lightweight evaluation method, which we use to evaluate four industry projects. In this chapter we outline the evaluation method, describe four industrial applications of the method and present an analysis of the findings. The results suggest that the proposed evaluation method is useful and the studied cases to a large extent have adequate requirements engineering processes although many important aspects are missing from their respective processes.