A Data-Centric Approach to Evaluate Requirements Engineering in Multidisciplinary Projects

Multidisciplinary teams are often a necessity for software projects as they provide the required expertise to effectively solve complex problems. However, efficient collaboration between teams with different disciplines is challenging due to several factors such as considering gaps in knowledge areas, establishing a development process, and understanding different requirements from various groups or stakeholders. The agile methodology, such as scrum, offers a powerful approach to managing the software development process effectively. As part of the agile methodology, some techniques and tools are used to manage requirements change, which is a common practice in multidisciplinary teams. This research aims to leverage process-mining techniques to analyze data from Jira and GitHub to analyze the efficacy of software development process, particularly in multidisciplinary teams. This approach is applied to a case study of a virtual healthcare intervention system to measure the team’s productivity. The results indicate several deficiencies in the process with respect to requirements engineering task that cause loss of time and increase rework rates. Results indicate that there are some challenges in the development process that contribute to some deficiencies. The rework rate is high and the number of tasks that are intended to be completed is less than what was planned. These factors can contribute to the lengthening of the software development process. Most of these challenges can be addressed by improving the requirement engineering process in order to obtain the requirements and manage change requests more efficiently.