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:

  1. RE in regulated environments (including concepts and tools to guide the elaboration, specification, and quality assurance of regulatory requirements),
  2. 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
  3. 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).

 

Daniel Mendez
Professor BTH / Lead competence field at fortiss

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.

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Konstantin Blaschke
PhD student (associated)

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.

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Michael Dorner
PhD student

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.

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Parisa Elahidoost
PhD student

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.

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Jannik Fischbach
Postdoctoral Researcher
Jannik works as a postdoctoral researcher at the research division Requirements Engineering at fortiss GmbH and as a consultant at Netlight GmbH. His research focuses on applying LP methods to support developers in implementing software intensive systems.
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Jonatan Flyckt
PhD Student (external/industry PhD)

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.

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Julian Frattini
PhD Student
Julian's research is centered around data-driven requirements engineering with a particular focus on analysing large amounts of requirements engineering artefacts. Natural language processing techniques as well as machine learning approaches aim towards deriving complex correlations, which can be used to establish measurements of quality in requirements artefacts. Julian is affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.
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Tony Gorschek
Professor
Full Professor at the Software Engineering Research Lab of the Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, and Senior Scientist at the research division Requirements Engineering at fortiss GmbH, the research institute of the Free State of Bavaria for software-intensive systems and services.
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Marco Hoffmann
PhD Student (external/industry PhD)
Marco is exploring human factors in software engineering teams. Of particular interest is the link between personal value diversity within a team and the occurrence and perception of human factors. He is CTO at Acureus and currently enrolled at the TUM Graduate School.
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Felix Jedrzejewski
PhD Student (associated)

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.

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Oleksandr Kosenkov
PhD Student
Oleksandr is investigating the area of regulatory Requirements Engineering with a particular focus on establishing an artefact model to guide the elaboration of requirements from legal contexts. A domain of interest is the one of public service media platforms. He is a research associate at fortiss GmbH and currently enrolled at the BTH's graduate program.
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Anton Luckhardt
Researcher and Developer
Anton investigates human factors and problems in software development with particular focus on cultural dimensions. He is further leading the tool development at the lab with a particular focus on establish an automated platform for assessing and visualising industrial RE practices and problems.
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Fabiola Moyon
PhD Student (external/industry PhD)
Fabiola's research focuses on security in software engineering. Her main interest is to extend agile methods with practices to ensure compliance with security standards. She envisions to develop a pragmatic approach to implement security standard requirements using DevOps pipelines as enablers and a conceptual framework to attest compliance. One particular proof of concept is the analysis of the IC 62443-4-1 Standard for Secure Development in Industrial Systems and its integration into the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe and Scrum. Fabiola is affiliated with Siemens AG and enrolled at the TUM Graduate School.
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Bhuwan Paudel
PhD Student

Bhuwan's research focuses on understanding (and effectively managing) the degradation of software artefacts in context of Technical Debt. Bhuwan is affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme.

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Peter Sjöberg
PhD Student (external/industry PhD)
Peter investigates the role of Requirements Engineering for the transformation of collaborative Systems of Systems. He is affiliated with Volvo CE and enrolled at the graduate programme of BTH.
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Lukas Thode
PhD Student (associated)

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.

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Former group members

Johannes Baier
Student Assistant

Johannes worked on topics related to the digitisation of business processes and investigates internal workshops of organisations to map and continuously improve them. 

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Mustafa Isik
PhD Student

Mustafa has been managing software engineering teams for the last fifteen years. He has worked for BMW Research, Avid Technology, Google, Bayerischer Rundfunk / ARD and various start-ups. His research interests are focused on turnover in software engineering organisations. Employee retention, mitigation of turnover effects, and similar issues as they affect software engineering organisations are also part of his research. Currently, he is Chief Technologist at Amazon Web Services.

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Mark Kreitz
PhD student

Mark investigates how security by design can and should be supported by tools in software engineering, focusing on static analysis tools. 

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Rahul Mohanani
Postdoctoral Researcher

Rahul's primary research interest lies at the intersection of software engineering (SE) and cognitive psychology, with a particular focus on early-stage RE, design, and software quality management. By adopting interdisciplinary empirical research methods, he aims at understanding the concept of creativity in SE and developing an evidence-based understanding of techniques and theories in creativity and innovation to improve software quality, reliability and productivity. 

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Raquel Ouriques
PhD Student

Raquel's research focuses on understanding and supporting knowledge management in agile software development. Raquel was affiliated with BTH and enrolled at BTH's graduate programme. She defended her PhD thesis in 2023.

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Norman Schaffer
PhD Student / Deputy Lead Competence Field at fortiss

Norman explores the evolution and inherent dynamics of business models to understand and support innovation in organizations. He was research associate at fortiss GmbH in the Requirements Engineering division. He defended his PhD thesis in 2023.

Jasmin Shokoui
Student Assistant

Jasmin explores the notion of responsibility in context of technology development in modern-day societies. 

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