A Grounded Theory of the Requirements Engineering Process

This paper explores the requirements engineering (RE) process by conducting interviews with RE professionals and applying grounded theory to determine whether a theory of RE emerges.Analysis of the interviews revealed prominent data patterns that were used to model the RE process. The model depicts the RE process as one of establishing a match through discovery and streamlining, and which utilizes corrective measures in order to manage threats to establishing a match. The process involves many entities but is mainly conducted by RE professionals whose experience plays a major role in extracting complete requirements and detecting occasions of mismatch between customer needs and the software requirements, which represent their main concern during the process.