Investigation of the Current Requirements Engineering Practices among Software Developers in Malaysia

Requirement engineering (RE) is a phase in software development that involves understanding, documenting, and managing the requirements of a software system. RE is a crucial and critical phase to obtain the essential requirements for the to-be-developed system is a reliable and workable system and, in the end to ensure that the software meets the needs and expectations of stakeholders. In Malaysia, software development teams typically follow industry-standard practices for requirement engineering which includes Requirements Elicitation, Requirement Analysis and Documentation, Requirement Validation, Requirement Management, Collaboration and Communication, Requirements Traceability and Agile and Iterative Approaches. This paper presents current RE practices by software development teams in Malaysia. A survey has been conducted to collect data from 12 companies comprises of varies business domain. The respondents were asked about the importance of activities conducted in practices of requirement elicitation, requirement analysis and negotiation, describing requirements, system modelling and requirement validation. At the end of the survey, the respondents were also asked about the indicators for software quality and software productivity. The results from the survey show an overview of how the software development practitioners perceive the importance of each activity in specific RE practices. This is important for the RE researcher to know for us to recommend methods and approaches that can help the practitioners to simplify the process without compromising the quality of the obtained software requirements.