Understanding Requirement Engineering Practices: An Empirical Study of the Pakistani Software Industry

2. Problem Statement And Methodology

The requirement engineering is a challenging and demanding phase in software development process. Many software development organizations do not follow standardized practices due to many issues such as cost, time, nature of project and geographical diversity of client/development team. Our focus in this chapter is to highlight major challenges that may encounter during requirement engineering process by Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in Pakistan. Software industry in Pakistan is young and mainly comprised of SMEs (cf. Mahmood & Saeed, 2008). Our main focus was to assess and analyze different practices of requirement engineering process in Pakistan.

In order to answer the questions we adopted a quantitative approach and a detailed questionnaire was developed, aimed at determining the different practices of requirement engineering process. There were total 17 questions. The questions addressed the knowledge on RE literature and Requirements Management (RM) tools as well as the current RE practices. Every question can be answered either a strongly agreed, agreed, uncertain, disagreed and strongly disagreed. Thirty questionnaires were sent to different organizations through emails and in person, out of which 19 questionnaire were received back. We analyzed the data and created bar charts against every question to examine the tending behavior of the industry towards every process of the requirement engineering process.