Lessons Learned from Best Practice-Oriented Process Improvement in Requirements Engineering: A Glance into Current Industrial RE Application

The increasing awareness about the importance of requirements engineering (RE) has tempted many enterprises to invest effort in the improvement of their corresponding RE processes. Many small and medium sized enterprises (SME) have less budget and effort available for improvement work and lack the in-house competence to make the improvements on their own. To compensate the lack of know-how in RE, many companies hire consulting companies or academics to assess the companies RE capabilities and to make improvement suggestions. However, improving and implementing successfully RE processes in SME\´s faces consultants and researcher from academia with the challenge to identify the current situation in the company on short notice and to briefly teach the practitioners on how to apply state of the art requirements engineering methods and techniques during daily work. This paper presents lessons learned from several RE process improvement case studies with SME\´s applying the Fraunhofer IESE ReqMan approach of best practice-oriented RE process improvement. We will illustrate the current situation we encountered in industrial RE application and present some implications for requirements engineering researchers about the "hot topics" for RE practitioners.