Requirement Engineering Practices - An Empirical Study

Requirement Engineering (RE) phase has been regarded as one of the important phases in the development process. Inadequate engineering of requirements can lead to more expensive errors in the later software development phases. Even though there are many methods and techniques which have been proposed in the literatures, many of these methods and techniques have not been widely practiced in the industry. To be able to rectify the situation, the assessment of the current practice is crucial. The main goal of this work is to investigate the software engineering practices especially the requirements engineering practices in the Malaysian software industry. Many of the practicing software developers are the product of the local educational institutions. The findings may help the industries to plan for enhancements in the requirement engineering practices. This research uses a survey instrument to gather data from 27 Malaysian based software firms. The main contribution of this research is the identification of the most practiced requirements engineering activities and the least practiced requirements engineering activities in the software firms.