product requirements

Specifying what a product must do through PRDs, user stories, acceptance criteria, non-functional requirements, and prioritized backlogs, using stakeholder interviews, user research, and measurable success metrics to translate needs into implementable engineering tasks.

productrequirements

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This study addresses the challenge of transforming stakeholder requirements into product requirements in software-driven automotive systems. Leveraging a dataset of 8,082 stakeholder requirements and 5,870 product requirements provided by Infineon, the research employs a hybrid methodology integrating structural statistics, decision modeling, traceability mining, textual analysis, and hardware-software linkage to systematically analyze the requirement refinement process. It reveals, for the first time, that requirement complexity primarily stems from ambiguous architectural scope and missing contextual information rather than linguistic redundancy. The work establishes a classification framework for mapping stakeholder to product requirements, identifies systematic differences across abstraction levels, and proposes key improvements in requirement validation, deviation management, and contextual tooling to support efficient and reusable automotive development.

automotive industryproduct requirementsrequirement engineering

Measuring the Fitness-for-Purpose of Requirements: An initial Model of Activities and Attributes

May 16, 2024
JF
Julian Frattini
🏛️ Blekinge Institute of Technology | Netlight Consulting GmbH | fortiss GmbH

Existing research lacks systematic methods to assess how requirements engineering (RE) impacts downstream development activities, hindering RE process optimization. Method: This paper proposes the first fitness-for-purpose RE impact assessment model, integrating a systematic literature review with multi-source empirical data to identify and structure 24 downstream development activities affected by requirements and 16 quantifiable attributes. Contribution/Results: The model bridges two critical gaps in requirements quality assessment—namely, the “activity dimension” and “measurability of impact”—by enabling empirical analysis of how specific requirements artifacts and processes concretely influence development practices. It provides a theoretically grounded framework and evidence-based decision support for precise, targeted optimization of the RE phase.

OptimizationRequirement EngineeringSoftware Development

This work proposes a systematic approach to derive task effectiveness requirements in the absence of explicit user needs. The method deconstructs task intent into context, functionality, constraints, critical dimensions, performance attributes, and architectural solutions, and introduces a task complexity factor to quantify the impact of external challenges and technology maturity. By integrating Best-Worst Scaling, it prioritizes critical dimensions based on stakeholder judgments. Through task decomposition modeling and quantitative complexity analysis, the framework supports integration with UAF/SysML artifacts and establishes a traceable mechanism for generating Tier 1 and Tier 2 requirements. The approach is validated using a close air support mission case study, effectively addressing a critical gap in requirements engineering when clear initial inputs are unavailable.

adaptive methodmission complexitymission effectiveness

Software requirements are often implicit in stakeholder interviews, making them difficult to capture explicitly yet critically important for system design. This work proposes LENS, a novel approach that leverages context-aware large language models (LLMs) to jointly extract explicit requirements and infer implicit ones from interview transcripts, while incorporating organizational context to generate traceable user stories. LENS enables unified modeling and traceability of both explicit and implicit requirements. Evaluated on 12 interview transcripts from the cybersecurity domain, the method achieves an F1 score of 84.4% in explicit requirement extraction, and 75% of the inferred implicit requirements were rated by domain experts as practically valuable, demonstrating its potential to support automation and reduce manual analysis effort.

implicit requirementslatent requirementsrequirements elicitation

Requirements Engineering for Research Software: A Vision

May 13, 2024
AB
Adrian Bajraktari
🏛️ University of Cologne

Scientific software development suffers from poorly specified requirements and inadequate management, severely compromising software quality and experimental reproducibility. To address this gap, this study formally establishes scientific software as a novel application domain for requirements engineering (RE). Through eight in-depth interviews with 12 researchers, we conduct an exploratory qualitative study employing thematic coding analysis. Our findings identify three core challenges: (1) highly ambiguous and evolving requirements, (2) latent or unidentified stakeholders, and (3) absence of systematic requirement validation mechanisms. Based on these insights, we propose a domain-specific RE vision and a challenge framework tailored to scientific software contexts. This work lays the theoretical foundation and methodological guidance for lightweight, agile, and traceable RE practices in scientific software development—thereby filling a critical void in systematic RE research for this domain.

Demand ManagementReliabilitySoftware Design

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Exploring the Use of LLMs for Requirements Specification in an IT Consulting Company

Jul 25, 2025
LP
Liliana Pasquale
🏛️ University College Dublin | University of Bari "A. Moro" | Polytechnic of Bari

In IT consulting, requirements specification writing faces challenges including fragmented domain knowledge and excessive time consumption. This paper proposes a human–AI collaborative requirements engineering paradigm: leveraging large language models (LLMs) as draft-generation engines, integrated with requirements summarization, template-guided structuring, and prompt engineering to automatically generate Epic-level Functional Design Specifications (FDS) and user stories. Human analysts focus on contextual understanding and technical validation, ensuring semantic accuracy and engineering feasibility. Experiments demonstrate that the approach reduces documentation time by 2.3× on average and cuts human effort by ~40%. Generated FDS documents achieve near-human performance in structural completeness and readability, with >92% coverage of critical requirements and manageable revision overhead. The core contribution is the first LLM-augmented requirements documentation framework tailored to consulting contexts—balancing automation efficiency with engineering reliability.

Addressing fragmented knowledge sources for efficient FDS generationAutomating requirements specification using LLMs in IT consultingBalancing LLM automation with human oversight for quality RE

This study addresses the challenge that stakeholders often struggle to articulate their true requirements accurately due to limited domain knowledge or cognitive biases, leading to misalignment between stated needs and underlying intentions. To bridge this gap, the authors propose a user-centered approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to contextually rewrite initial requirements, followed by an iterative human-in-the-loop feedback mechanism for validation and refinement. As the first empirical investigation of its kind, the work demonstrates the efficacy of LLMs as assistive tools in requirements elicitation. In an evaluation involving 130 requirements from 26 participants, LLM-rewritten versions significantly outperformed original statements in intent alignment, readability, logical coherence, and unambiguity, while also uncovering latent requirement details, thereby enhancing both the accuracy and completeness of the requirements gathering process.

cognitive constraintsdomain knowledgerequirement expression

This study addresses the inefficiencies in requirements management within large-scale agile development, stemming from the absence of a unified requirements engineering process and high-level guiding principles. Through a five-year longitudinal industrial case study encompassing over 25 sprints, more than 320 weekly meetings, seven cross-organizational workshops, and focused group interviews, the research employs thematic analysis to distill six transferable and scalable core principles—such as architectural context, stakeholder-driven validation, and lightweight documentation evolution. Validated across multiple multinational enterprises, these principles significantly enhance requirements management effectiveness in large-scale agile settings. This work presents the first systematic strategic requirements engineering framework tailored specifically for such complex environments.

agile developmentguiding principleslarge-scale agile

Human-centered Requirements Engineering (HC-RE) integrates user cognition, emotions, and social interactions into the RE process through contributions from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, design thinking, and human-computer interaction. Despite growing interest, how these multidisciplinary contributions are structured and why they remain fragmented across the RE lifecycle is not well understood. This systematic mapping study analyzes 56 primary studies across seven dimensions, including RE phases, user involvement techniques, contributing disciplines, and evaluation methods. Results show that 70\% of approaches involve multidisciplinary contributions, yet only 39% have been empirically evaluated and 48% address only the elicitation phase. A cross-study analysis reveals a structural separation between two parallel integration traditions: a Cognitive-Formal (C-F) pathway grounded in goal-based frameworks and formal modeling, and a Participatory-Iterative (P-I) pathway grounded in scenario-based frameworks and iterative design. Each pathway has developed complementary strengths, but their near-total disconnection explains the persistent lifecycle concentration and theory-practice gap observed in the corpus. The findings identify the absence of translation mechanisms between human-centered artifacts and formal RE specifications as the field's primary structural gap, provide a structured research agenda organized into four priority tiers, and establish the empirical foundation for Experience-Centered Requirements Engineering, a direction in which user experience is explicitly operationalized as a first-class concern in requirements specification.

Human-centered Requirements Engineeringintegration pathwaysmultidisciplinary fragmentation

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