RE Theory Meets Software Practice: Lessons from the Software Development Trenches

Under today´s fiercely competitive conditions, companies are seeking new means to develop innovative products that satisfy customer and user needs. In order to understand how requirements engineering (RE) can support innovations, we observed RE activities in six Finnish companies. Our observations indicate that RE can play a vital role in the development of innovative products. We identified three main opportunities for innovations: 1) discovering hidden customer and user needs, 2) inventing new product features that satisfy these needs, and 3) supporting feature development with an innovative technical solution. Based on our observations, as well as on existing innovation and business-management literature, we have concluded that RE research can gain significant results by investigating how to discover and model hidden customer and user needs. We believe that this would allow RE to much better support those innovation practices that provide real competitive advantage.