What makes service oriented requirements engineering challenging? a qualitative study

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development, and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognized in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in Requirements Engineering (RE). The objective of this paper is to investigate these challenges of Service Oriented Requirements Engineering (SORE) from practitioners’ perspectives in order to gain a deeper understanding of the related issues and to reveal potential gaps between research and practice in SORE. We present a qualitative study of the challenges and issues in SORE. The data was collected by conducting interviews with practitioners working in IT companies in Sydney, who have had substantial experience with service oriented software projects. Our findings reveal that most of the challenges of SORE are similar to those that are faced during RE in traditional or component based software development. According to the practitioners, the research and practice has made some advances in the technical direction but the human related issues in SORE have not been addressed adequately.