Implications of Requirements Engineering on Software Design: A Cognitive Insight

There is a broad consensus that understanding software requirements is critical in designing a good software system. Software engineering research literature is rife with state of the art practices and techniques that are proposed to improve requirements engineering techniques. Also, creative approaches are used to determine system requirements in a better way. However, little empirical research has investigated the critical underpinnings of human psychology on design performance from elicited requirements, and its implications on high-level design creativity. The foremost objective of this research will be to explore the harmful effects of human cognitive biases on the designers' ability to generate conceptual designs from a set of requirements, and then to mitigate the harmful effects of biases by developing specific de-biasing technique(s) to enhance creativity of such design concepts. The research will adopt a quantitative approach, i.e., data will be collected through controlled experiments; also the existing literature will be reviewed. Exploring the manifestation of cognitive biases and its subsequent mitigation techniques shall help augmenting the focus of software engineering design research approach from technological to psychological.