Supporting Requirements Engineering Research that Industry Needs: The Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering Initiative

In light of the 40th jubilee of Requirements Engineering (RE), roughly 40 experts met in Switzerland to discuss where our discipline stands today [1]. 40 years after RE was acknowledged for the first time as an independent discipline in an issue of the Transactions of Software Engineering, a strong and (more or less) self-confident research community has emerged and contributed a variety of tools, methods, and approaches to the field. As of today, the common view is, indisputably, that “RE as a discipline is stable and respected”, as pointed out by Sarah Gregory when covering the seminar in her column [1] to which articles like this one are invited to present ongoing research. However, it is also evident that after 40 years of promising research, conducting “research that industry needs” is still an ongoing challenge. Research that industry needs means research that solves industrial problems practitioners face; but do we really understand those practitioners’ problems? Here, I want to recapitulate on this research challenge and outline an initiative, the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering Initiative, that aims at tackling this problem. Before doing so, let’s briefly recapitulate the current state of Requirements Engineering Research and Practice.