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Challenges of working with artifacts in requirements engineering and software engineering

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Abstract

When developing or evolving software systems of non-trivial size, having the requirements properly documented is a crucial success factor. The time and effort required for creating and maintaining non-code artifacts are significantly influenced by the tools with which practitioners view, navigate and edit these artifacts. This is not only true for requirements, but for any artifacts used when developing or evolving systems. However, there is not much evidence about how practitioners actually work with artifacts and how well software tools support them. Therefore, we conducted an exploratory study based on 29 interviews with software practitioners to understand the current practice of presenting and manipulating artifacts in tools, how practitioners deal with the challenges encountered, and how these challenges affect the usability of the tools used. We found that practitioners typically work with several interrelated artifacts concurrently, less than half of these artifacts can be displayed entirely on a large screen, the artifact interrelationship information is often missing, and practitioners work collaboratively on artifacts without sufficient support. We identify the existing challenges of working with artifacts and discuss existing solutions proposed addressing them. Our results contribute to the body of knowledge about how practitioners work with artifacts when developing or evolving software, the challenges they are faced with, and the attempts to address these challenges.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/people/ghazi/InterviewInstrument2016.pdf

  2. http://www.ifi.uzh.ch/rerg/people/ghazi/Follow-upSurvey2016.pdf

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Dr. Irina Todoran Koitz for the insightful discussions and valuable feedback. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions that enabled us to improve this paper. We would also like to thank all the participants and their companies for their time and valuable contributions that made the data collection possible for this research.

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  1. Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland

    Parisa Ghazi & Martin Glinz

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  1. Parisa Ghazi
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Correspondence to Parisa Ghazi.

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Ghazi, P., Glinz, M. Challenges of working with artifacts in requirements engineering and software engineering. Requirements Eng 22, 359–385 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0272-z

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