Requirements Engineering Journal

Requirements Engineering as a Success Factor in Software Projects by Lehner and Hoffmann (2001)
The authors conducted a study of the requirements engineering process in 15 software projects form a diverse range of industries. They investigated the RE practices and process that were used in each team and through questionnaires and interviews, collected data directly from each project’s stakeholders. A very insightful journal will be quoting this a lot!

More research - the inevitable incorrect/imcomplete requirements

The article: Estimating software projects(2001).
This article addressed the issue of the inaccuracy of project cost estimations due to that fact that it is done in the initial stages of the software development process and therefore likely to be based on incorrect or incomplete software requirements. More specifically it details the causes of poor and inaccurate estimation as being a result of imprecise and drifting requirements, new software projects are nearly always different form the last, software practitioners don't collect enough information about past projects, estimates are forced to match the resources available and there is a general lack of acceptance that developing software is an expensive endeavor. It went on to suggest cost estimation techniques and their various success rates.
This article lead me to the following questions: Does this mean that the completed, correct and non-changing requirement document which is need to deliver a successful project is never available at the commencement of a project? And that IT managers have come to expect this and concentrate their effects on the inevitable add ons and complications? Perhaps this is the reason why there is much focus on a project's contract and accountability. Or perhaps I have become too pessimistic :-D

Interesting citations

"The majority of web-based applications have three main attributes that usually differentiate them from more traditional software applications, they are: (a) network intensive, (b) content driven and (c) continuously evolving; these attributes have a profound impact on the way Web Engineering is conducted [22]." (Pressman, 2000)

Pressman's thoughts on web-based development echo my experiences at Allette Systems. Network intensive corresponds to the need for interoperability amount different applications, content driven is the complexity associated with the various data transformations and continuously evolving can be associated the need for compliance to standards that existing web based applications are expected to adhere to.

Research to date

In the initial stages of my project, I have decided to only research about the subject matter through the reading of journals articles, books and other online reputable sources and discussions with experts in the field. This is to further my understanding of the areas of which my topic covers, more specifically requirements engineering and XML development fields. The following are the articles/chapters in books that I have read to date:

• Research Directions in Requirements Engineering by Betty H.C. Cheng and Joanne M. Atlee
• Towards a Requirements-driven Workbench for Supporting Software Certification and Accreditation by Seok-Won Lee, Robin A. Gandhi and Siddharth
• Aspectual Support for Specifying Requirements in Software Product Lines by Harvey Siy, Prasanna Aryal, Victor Winter, Mansour Zand
• Specification of Non-functional Requirements for Contract Specification in
  the NGOSS Framework for Quality Management and Product Evaluation by
  Xiaoqing (Frank) Liu, Manooch Azmoodeh, Nektarios Georgalas
• Requirements development as a modeling activity by Sergey Diev
• Modularisation and Composition of Aspectual Requirements by Awais Rashid, Anna Moreira, Joao Ara0jo
• R. Pressman. Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s
  Approach. Mc-Graw Hill, New York, NY, fifth edition,
  2000. Chapter 29.