Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical determinant for software quality. At the same time, many projects still suffer from insufficient RE. 33% of software development errors are estimated to have their origin in insufficient RE and 36% of these errors are known to lead to project failures [NaPiRE]. In a world pervaded by software and where the majority of our daily routines are supported – if not dominated – by software-intensive systems, excellence in RE becomes key. While it is understood that the various influences in industrial RE practices and surrounding development processes and tools render standardisation efforts of RE approaches cumbersome, much of today’s research in RE still relies on conventional and often purely academic wisdom. This often leads to contributions to problems not well understood and, thus, prone to be of limited practical value. The sensitivity of RE excellence to the particularities of practical contexts makes evident that only if we approach requirements engineering research in an evidence-based manner, we are able to tackle the emergent challenges in today’s requirements engineering where we need to reason about our discipline and the plethora of available practices, methods, and tools.
Closing this existing gap is in scope of the empirical Requirements Engineering (empiRE) research group which is driven by problem-oriented, empirical, and interdisciplinary research. We rely on continuous experimentation, development, evaluation, and transfer – all in close collaboration with the software industry. Of particular interest is to investigate how we can contribute practically relevant RE research to reproducibly control and improve the quality of industrial requirements engineering endeavours.
Research projects focus typically on three larger (interrelated) thematic areas:
- RE in regulated environments (including concepts and tools to guide the elaboration, specification, and quality assurance of regulatory requirements),
- RE in data-driven environments (including concepts and tools for automation in RE and its quality assurance as well as RE for data-centric software systems), and
- RE in human-centric environments (including concepts and techniques for human-centred problem exploration such as design thinking and their integration into model-based engineering approaches).
Typical assets (i.e. technical artefacts) we develop along those areas include, for instance:
- (Artefact-centric) Methodologies that guide engineers in efficiently handling their requirements from their elicitation, over their analysis and documentation, to their validation and verification; for instance, approaches that help engineers aligning their requirements with regulations or that guide the integration of creativity techniques, such as design thinking, into requirements engineering.
- Tool-support that helps engineering solving particularly labor-intensive and error-prone tasks; for instance; tools that make use of natural language processing to help aligning requirements with surrounding regulations.
- Dissemination concepts and formats that help increasing the awareness for a requirements engineering tailored to individual industrial contexts; for instance, an RE quick check or training concepts.
Our major underlying research philosophy we rely on is based on empirical software engineering and academia-industry co-production. That includes the principle of applied, evidence-based research, but also extends to central questions in the philosophy of science for software engineering with the goal of extending our research methods to increase the practical relevance of our research contributions and to eventually build strong and robust software engineering theories. Finally, adhering to and fostering Open Science principles are a natural (and fundamental) consequence.
Organisational setting
The research group virtually comprehends members at the Software Engineering Research Lab (SERL Sweden) at BTH – having a strong focus on and reputation in empirical and applied software engineering research and higher education – and at fortiss GmbH – having a strong focus on and reputation in applied research and technology transfer in engineering of software-intensive systems and services. At fortiss, it manifests itself as an explicit research division (“field of competence”) for Requirements Engineering. Both (independent) units actively exchange and collaborate with each other on a frequent basis to foster the symbiotic relationship facilitating the effective use of synergies in applied research, technology transfer, and activities in higher education.
Group members
The group includes researchers and developers at all levels and affiliated with BTH, fortiss, or other institutions in case of external (e.g. industry) PhD students. Doctoral students are either enrolled at the Technical University of Munich (starting before 2019) or at the Blekinge Institute of Technology (starting from 2019 on) and may include associated doctoral students (in the form of secondary supervision).
Full Professor at the Software Engineering Research Lab of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Senior Scientist heading the research division Requirements Engineering at fortiss GmbH, the research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems and services.
In his research at fortiss, Konstantin explores the notion of traceability in software architectures. He is affiliated with fortiss and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.
In his research at BTH, Michael explores how social diffusion, the process by which ideas, innovations, knowledge, and other information spread through a social group, affects collaboration in software engineering and software quality with respect to code review. He is affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.
Parisa's research focus is the development of a tool-supported approach for the automatic extraction and compliance checking of regulatory requirements from legal texts. She is a research associate at fortiss GmbH and currently enrolled at the BTH's graduate program.
Jonatan’s research is at the intersection between Machine Learning and Software Engineering where he explores, in close collaboration with industry, the role of automation to support decisions, and improve products and services in the manufacturing industry. He is affiliated with Herenco and enrolled at the graduate school of BTH.
Felix's research is at the intersection between Software Engineering and Adversarial Machine Learning, and he works in close collaboration with industry. His interest is to explore the implementation of current defense strategies for Machine Learning models into the Software Development Lifecycle. Felix is affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.
Lukas' research focuses on the intersection of Machine Learning and financial services, and he collaborates closely with industry. More specifically, he concentrates on the creation of decision support systems for financial products at the industrial side. Lukas is affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.