Requirements Engineering in an Emerging Market

The growing importance of requirements engineering (RE) in software development cannot be overemphasized. A faulty requirements gathering exercise and the emergent requirements document could mislead the entire software development drive, resulting in a software product that falls short of user expectation in terms of meeting needs and delivering within budget, time and scope. Achieving the objective of a well articulated and coordinated requirements document in an ideal economic environment is tasking let alone in an emerging market characterized by macro-economic variables such as high cost of doing business, weak institutions, poor infrastructure, lack of skilled and competitive workforce, among others coupled with micro-economic (personal) tendencies like resistance to change, vested interest, technophobia and insider abuse. This paper reports on industrial experience of designing and implementing an n-tier enterprise application in an African university using service oriented software engineering (SOSE) approach. The application is meant to facilitate the actualization of the 25-year strategic plan of the institution. We applied design and software engineering skills: Literature were examined, requirements gathered, the n-tier enterprise solution modeled using unified modeling language (UML), implementation achieved using Microsoft SharePoint and the results evaluated. Though success was recorded, the challenges encountered during the requirements engineering stage were quiet reflective of the challenges of software project management in a typical relatively unstable macroeconomic environment. The outcome of this study is a compendium of lessons learnt and recommendation for successful RE in the context of an emerging economy like Africa in the hope that this will guide would-be software stakeholders in such a business landscape.