Context: Requirements engineering (RE) research has been receiving much attention from industry for many years. As the complexity of the software projects has vastly increased, project managers find it imperative that their RE processes are streamlined in order to extract maximum value. There is a need for specialized requirements engineering process improvement (REPI). However, there are no state-of-the-art studies done in the field of REPI that talk about the established concepts and their feasibility. Objective: We aim to get an overview of the current state of reported research in RE process improvement, in terms of existing solutions, evaluations, experience reports, and opinion papers. A state-of-the-art view of process improvement with special attention on the particularities of RE will help drive efforts towards targeted gaps in research. Method: To get an overview of the state of research in REPI, we conduct a systematic mapping study of the publication space. The collection of papers is first filtered based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria. The list of relevant papers are arranged according to their respective years of publication and then classified according to our research questions like on the research type facet, RE phase discussion or contribution paradigm. Results: Our review of 58 publications shows that until 2002, only a few solutions were proposed to improve RE processes. The research gathered steam after 2002 when more improvement solutions were presented and experiences in their industrial applications could be discussed. Most of these publications dealt with REPI with a focus on activity based improvement in RE. Conclusion: We see from our results that much effort has been spent on activity-based RE improvement based on existing norms, i.e. REPI is mostly done by adapting the activities provided in the norms. However, there is still little known about the problem-driven improvement of RE w.r.t. individual goals and problems while focusing on the quality of the created RE artefacts.      «

Context: Requirements engineering (RE) research has been receiving much attention from industry for many years. As the complexity of the software projects has vastly increased, project managers find it imperative that their RE processes are streamlined in order to extract maximum value. There is a need for specialized requirements engineering process improvement (REPI). However, there are no state-of-the-art studies done in the field of REPI that talk about the established concepts and their fea...     »