Dynamic Situational Adaptation of a Requirements Engineering Process

Literature shows that the elicitation techniques used in a requirements engineering process are often chosen based on the particular characteristics of the application context, mainly related to the involved human sources of information. However, these particularities, usually called situational factors, are seldom taken into account in other activities of the requirements process. Most situational factors, when considered in software projects, have a high influence on the requirements process. Therefore, the different situations that may attempt against or may favor a successful requirements process should be identified at the beginning of the project. Additionally, some factors may evolve along with software development life cycle; this may imply re-planning the requirements process at later strategic milestones. In this chapter, a process for constructing and dynamically adapting a requirements process is proposed. The process uses different combinations of situational factors at specific variation points and manages a repository of process blocks to perform the tailoring.