Abstract
Context and motivation: In this industry-academia collaborative project, a team of researchers, supported by a software architect, business analyst, and test engineer explored the challenges of requirement variability in a large business software development company. Question/ problem: Following the design science paradigm, we studied the problem of requirements analysis and tracing in the context of contractual documents, with a specific focus on managing requirements variability. This paper reports on the lessons learned from that experience, highlighting the strategies and insights gained in the realm of requirements variability management.Principal ideas/results: This experience report outlines the insights gained from applying design science in requirements engineering research in industry. We show and evaluate various strategies to tackle the issue of requirement variability. Contribution: We report on the iterations and how the solution development evolved in parallel with problem understanding. From this process, we derive five key lessons learned to highlight the effectiveness of design science in exploring solutions for requirement variability in contract-based environments.
P. Liljenberg affiliated with Visma, Sambandsvägen 5, 35236 Växjö Sweden at the time of the research.
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Notes
- 1.
rethought.se.
- 2.
Contracts are available upon request https://zenodo.org/records/10640865.
- 3.
Swedish: Semesteravdrag.
- 4.
Swedish: För varje uttagen obetald semesterdag görs avdrag fråntjänstemannens aktuella manadslon med 4,6 % av månadslönen.
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Acknowledgment
We would like to thank all employees at Visma who supported our study. This work was further supported by the KKS foundation through the S.E.R.T. Research Profile project at Blekinge Institute of Technology.
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Elahidoost, P., Unterkalmsteiner, M., Fucci, D., Liljenberg, P., Fischbach, J. (2024). Designing NLP-Based Solutions for Requirements Variability Management: Experiences from a Design Science Study at Visma. In: Mendez, D., Moreira, A. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14588. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-57327-9_12
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