A study of factors affecting requirement communication between different roles involved in requirements engineering process

Background​. Requirements communication is an important activity that involves various stages in the project development process. Correctly understanding the requirements of stakeholders and effectively communicating them are key factors for the success of the project. In addition, it is critical to communicate any requirements changes during project development, so effective requirement communication plays an active role in project life cycle. In the existing research, many authors have reported the importance of requirement communication, but there are still research gaps in specific areas. Therefore, we focus our attention on requirement types, requirement volatility and participations’ roles, and explore the impact of these aspects on requirement communication. Objectives​. In this thesis, we focused on the factors affecting requirement communication. The main objective is to understand and analyze the impact of requirement types and requirement volatility on requirement communication between different roles, and explore the challenges encountered in requirement communication. For the challenges that have been identified, we have summarized some solutions to achieve effective requirements communication. Methods​. In this thesis, we use systematic literature review (SLR) and survey methods. Firstly, the snowballing iteration method was used to perform five forward and backward snowballing iteration. 27 articles were identified to understand the current research process of requirement communication and to extract the challenges faced by requirement communication. Then conducted an online survey based on the results of the SLR, with the purpose of verifying the data obtained from the SLR and understanding the actual requirement communication status. Perform statistical analysis and narrative analysis on all results to identify the relationship between the data needed for our research. Results​. 27 articles are finally selected by us through SLR. Through the full context of those 27 articles, we identified 7 articles that related to different roles involved in requirement communication, 4 articles that mentioned requirement volatility, 11 articles that identified challenges encountered in requirement communication and 17 articles that provided solutions to improving requirement communication. Based on the answers from Survey, we identified the factors that affecting requirement communication from three aspects, which are requirement types, requirement volatility and different roles. What’s more, a new challenge is identified from the answers of open-questions. Conclusions​. According to the analysis and results of SLR and Survey, we can clearly conclude that requirement volatility and requirement types will affect the selection of communication method and requirement volatility will further influence the final result of requirement communication. However, there is no significantly relationship between different roles and the selection of communication method. In addition, 8 challenges are identified from the analysis of SLR while a new challenge is identified from the answers of open-questions. Three types of solutions are also identified and organized from SLR, which are using models, patterns, frameworks, and other techniques, suitable consideration of communication methods and some specific suggestions