The various influences in the processes and application domains make requirements engineering (RE) inherently complex and difficult to implement. In general, we have two options for establishing an RE approach: We can either establish an activity-based RE approach, or we can establish an artefact-based one where project participants concentrate on the RE artefacts rather than on the way of creating them. While a number of activity-based RE approaches have been proposed in recent years, we have gained much empirical evidence and experiences about the advantages of the artefact-based paradigm for RE. However, artefact orientation is still a young paradigm with various interpretations and practical manifestations whereby we need a clear understanding of its basic concepts and a consolidated and evaluated view on the paradigm. In this article, we contribute an artefact-based approach to RE [artefact model for domain-independent RE (AMDiRE)] that emerges from 6 years of experiences in fundamental and evidence-based research. To this end, we first discuss the basic notion of artefact orientation and its evolution in recent years. We briefly introduce a set of artefact-based RE models we developed in industrial research cooperations for different application domains and show their empirical evaluations and their dissemination into academia and practice, eventually leading to the AMDiRE approach. We conclude with a discussion of experiences we made during the development and different industrial evaluations, and lessons learnt.
Dominated by the behavioral science approach for a long time, information systems research increasingly acknowledges design science as a complementary approach. While primarily information systems instantiations, but also constructs and models have been discussed quite comprehensively, the design of methods is addressed rarely. But methods appear to be of utmost importance particularly for organizational engineering. This paper justifies method construction as a core approach to organizational engineering. Based on a discussion of fundamental scientific positions in general and approaches to information systems research in particular, appropriate conceptualizations of 'method' and 'method construction' are presented. These conceptualizations are then discussed regarding their capability of supporting organizational engineering. Our analysis is located on a meta level: Method construction is conceptualized and integrated from a large number of references. Method instantiations or method engineering approaches however are only referenced and not described in detail. [Background:] Nowadays, industries are facing the problem that the Requirements Engineering (RE) process is highly volatile, since it depends on project influences from the customer's domain or from process models used. Artefact-based approaches promise to provide guidance in the creation of consistent artefacts in volatile project environments, because these approaches concentrate on the artefacts and their dependencies, instead of prescribing processes. Yet missing, however, is empirical evidence on the advantages of applying artefact-based RE approaches in real projects. [Aim:] We developed a customisable artefact-based RE approach for the domain of business information systems. Our goal is to investigate the advantages and limitations of applying this customisable approach in an industrial context. [Method:] We conduct a case study with our artefact-based RE approach and its customisation procedure. For this, we apply it at a software development project at Siemens following the steps of the customisation procedure. We assess our approach in direct comparison with the previously used RE approach considering possible improvements in the process and in the quality of the produced artefacts. [Results:] We show that our approach is flexible enough to respond to the individual needs in the analysed project environment. Although the approach is not rated to be more productive, we find an improvement in the syntactic and the semantic quality of the created artefacts. [Conclusions:] We close a gap in the RE literature by giving empirical evidence on the advantages of artefact orientation in RE in an industrial setting. Although software process proposals appear continuously, it is difficult to fit any of them into a given company as they are. Thus, some kind of adaptation or tailoring is always necessary. The goal of software process tailoring is to adapt an "off-the-shelf" software process to meet the needs of a specific organization or project. Although process tailoring is a mandatory activity in most software process proposals, it is usually carried out by following an ad-hoc approach, and the amount of research done on this topic to date can be considered small. This paper presents a systematic review of software process tailoring, analyzing the existing approaches towards this activity, discussing the main issues related to the problem, and providing an up-to-date and complete framework in which to position new research activities. This article presents a model for projects that have to adhere to Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order for their results to be aligned with the broader organization. The model features project artifacts (i.e. deliverables such as Software Architecture Documents), their mutual relationships, their relationship with EA, and the processes in which they are created and tested on conformance. We start with applying Activity Theory to show the crucial mediating role that artifacts have in projects and to identify and justify the new EA-related artifacts we introduce. We subsequently incorporate these findings and existing best practices in a standard systems development approach in order to create a practical model that projects can apply for EA conformance. This model features both new, dedicated EA artifacts, and well-known existing artifacts of which we describe the way they should conform to EA. Finally, two action research studies are used to empirically support the model.