The impact that the quality of requirements can have on the work and well-being of practitioners in software development. : An interview study

Abstract: Requirements, key artifacts of requirements engineering, are a fundamental part of any software development, used by the different software development roles in their activities, such as designing the interface for a feature, its development, and the creation of test cases made by testers. This study aims to investigate the impact of misalignment in the use, understanding, and intent of requirements between the requirements engineers that create the requirements and other software roles that use them in their work activities and betweendevelopers and testers in their software development and testing activities. The impacted areas that this study focuses on are the work activities of the different roles involved with requirements in the development process, their workload, and their well-being and morale.The two research objectives are:i) How do software development practitioners define the quality of requirements?ii) How do the perceived quality of requirements impact the work of the different roles involved in the software development process?This study was performed as a descriptive interview study that follows the case study guidelines written by Runeson and Höst [14] at a sub-organization of a Nordic bank that developed their own web and apps. The data collection comprises interviewing 20 practitioners:requirements engineers, developers, testers, and newly employed developers, with fiveinterviewees from each group.The results of this study show that there are, in fact, different views across different roles of what makes a requirement good. There are also some similarities between the general characteristics described by the practitioners that they perceive make requirements good and the characteristics described in the ISO [21] and IREB [26] standards.The practitioners stated that, in general, they experienced negative feelings, more work,and overhead communication when they worked with requirements they perceived to be bad. The practitioners also described in general positive effects on their work and feelings when they worked with requirements that they perceived to be good.A conclusion that can be drawn from the study is that the quality of requirements and the requirements engineering process matter to software development and can have big impacts on the morale and effectiveness, and efficiency of the different roles that work with the requirements.