Abstract
Software requirements specifications (SRS) serve as an important source of information for a variety of roles involved in software engineering (SE) projects. This situation poses a challenge to requirements engineers: Different information needs have to be addressed, which are strongly dependent on the particular role(s) that SRS stakeholders have within a project. This chapter summarizes the contributions of a thesis that aimed to address and reduce role-specific defects in SRS that negatively influence the efficient usage and acceptance of these documents. To achieve this goal, we collected empirical data about role-specific information needs in a series of empirical studies that served as a baseline for a secondary analysis toward the definition of role-specific views. Moreover, we realized a proof-of-concept implementation that is capable of generating role-specific views on SRS. The results of a case study revealed that role-specific views have the potential to efficiently support SRS consumers during the analysis of a given SRS. Besides conducting further empirical studies in industry, future work aims to foster cross-disciplinary collaboration and requirements communication, especially in agile teams. Thereby, we are exploring synergy potential with best practices from non-SE disciplines.
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Acknowledgments
I sincerely thank my supervisors Prof. Dieter Rombach, Prof. Barbara Paech, and Prof. Schneider as well as Dr. Jörg Dörr, Dr. Marcus Trapp, and Prof. Norbert Seyff for their continuous support and valuable advice, which helped me a lot to shape the thesis and to align and focus my research activities.
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Hess, A. (2022). Crossing Disciplinary Borders to Improve Requirements Communication. In: Felderer, M., et al. Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2020. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83128-8_7
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