access icon free Requirement patterns: a tertiary study and a research agenda

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology
Received 18/01/2019, Accepted 09/09/2019, Revised 05/07/2019, Published 17/09/2019

The low performance of software projects generally arises from erroneous, omitted, misinterpreted, or conflicting requirements. To produce better quality specifications, the practise of requirements reuse through requirement patterns has been widely debated in the secondary literature. However, a tertiary study that provides an overview of secondary studies on the state of the art and the practise of requirement patterns does not exist. This study describes a study of secondary literature on requirement patterns under a perspective on research and practise. The identification and selection methods of secondary studies include automatic search on five sources, inclusion, and exclusion criteria, the snowballing technique, and the quality assessment of those studies. Four secondary studies are considered relevant according to the purpose of this research from a 26-distinct-study group. The authors’ contribution is two-fold: the tertiary study itself and a preliminary research agenda dealing with state of the art and practise on requirement patterns.

Inspec keywords: project management; software development management

Other keywords: requirement patterns; secondary studies; software projects; conflicting requirements; 26-distinct-study group; tertiary study; requirements reuse; secondary literature

Subjects: Software engineering techniques; Software management

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