Evaluating the requirements engineering process using major concerns

The complexity and variety of software projects, the multidisciplinary and uncertainty of requirements engineering (RE) demand adoption of good RE practices. The most noticeable work of RE process assessment and improvement is the CMM-like three level RE process maturity assessment model by Sommerville and Sawyer [1]. This paper proposes a new RE process assessment method. The novelty of this research is threefold: firstly, it proposes a new concept "COncern of Requirement Engineering (CORE) to be used in RE process development and assessment. Secondly, it proposes a list of major COREs based on theoretical research and an industrial survey. Thirdly, a RE process assessment model has been proposed based on the concept of CORE and initial list of major COREs. A case study based on CORE is presented to show the applicability of the concept and the assessment model developed. This work is a part of the framework for RE process development in our current research.