For this assignment, you have to complete a literature review on the topic of requirements engineering practice. Literature reviews give you the opportunity to get a good overview of the field or of a specific topic within the field.

The purpose of a literature review is that someone else who is interested in the topic can read your review and get a good understanding of what the state of the art of that topic is, of what the best practices are (for example, which methods are most popular), and what the challenges are (what people struggle with in practice in that topic).

This is an exercise that requires good academic writing, which means you have to include a fill list of reference and you have to cite works that you take ideas and content from throughout your paper. The reason for that is that no one would expect you to come up with all those ideas by yourself, but therefore you have to make clear which ideas come from somewhere else and which ideas were truly your own. Even though that style of writing is often called academic writing that doesn’t mean it is not useful for non-academic purposes. As soon as you write something other than fiction, you always have to reference your information sources, also when you write a report in the industry.

Make sure you describe the context of your work in an abstract or executive summary. An abstract is the “business card” of your report. Four sentences that describe the context and motivation (in your case: requirements engineering), the problem you are tackling (in your case: best practices and challenges), the solution or contribution you are providing (in your case: literature survey), and the impact your contribution has (in your case: others can get an easy overview).

If you have never written a literature review yourself, please make sure to look at each others’ drafts and giving each other feedback on how they could be improved. Two pairs of eyes see more than one. That does not mean you should copy from each other but it means to learn from each other with regard to how to approach a problem and how to report on research. It happens often that I write a paragraph that is entirely clear to me but when I let one of my colleagues review it, they point out what they don’t understand in that paragraph (because they are not as deep into my specific topic and therefore need things explained in a different way). Use that same concept of peer-review for improving your own writing.

Follow these steps - things that are in bold go into the report as well.

• Read the guidelines on how to conduct a literature review if you have never done one.
• Use the template on the next page to structure your (5-page, 10pt, single spacing) report.
• Specify your exact research question, e.g. pick one of the following or define your own:

o Proposals “What is the state of practice in RE in industry?”

o “What are the methods used in practice in requirements engineering?”

o “What methods are used in practice for RE for mobile device applications?”

o “What frameworks are used in practice for RE?”

• Choose an academic search engine you want to work with. Look up the available ones or you might consider using scholar.google.com
• Carry out the search for “Requirements Engineering Practice” and define your selection criteria, for example peer-reviewed articles (journals or conferences), published within last 10 years, in English, etc.
• Select the ten search results best fitting your criteria
• Make a table structure for the analysis and compare them in the table. Provide a brief summary of every paper (2-3 sentences).
• Summarize what the overall findings are with regard to what has been achieved in practice (also over time), what the best practices are, and what the problems and challenges are à all of that goes into synthesis.
• Conclude with an outlook of what is important future work in RE.
• Tips:
  • Support your statements and opinions with ample evidence.
  • When choosing the works that you wish to include in your review, be selective.
  • Avoid the use of direct speech and quotations from the works, unless necessary.
  • Include your own opinions as well, instead of merely summarizing the works.
  • Don't forget to revise your work after it's completed.

Deliverables:

1. A single pdf file per student should be submitted to via Blackboard.
2. Make sure the first page includes your name and student ID.

Evaluation criteria:

• Review carried out as described above
• Adhered to template and wrote a report according to guidelines
• Reasonable selection of included articles that is well argumented
• Synthesis of most important aspects in overview table of the ten articles
• Thorough summary of what has been achieved in practice and what the problems and challenges are.
• Report is well written and easy to understand

Template for the literature review

Title

This is where you mention the title of the literature review.

Introduction

The introduction again consists of two parts; background and objectives.

Background

Here you should mention the reason you chose this topic.

Objectives

In this section, you mention the objectives for writing the literature review, say, for highlighting certain areas that need further research. Research question from above goes here!

Search Strategy

This is where you should mention what are the methods you have used to search for the data collected for your work. Remember to mention every source of reference used, such as books, journals, research papers, etc. If you have taken the help of any organization for collection of relevant data, make sure to mention the names. Also add the names of search engines used to obtain the data.

Criteria for Selection

You need to mention somewhere the criterion/criteria used for selecting material for your work. A literature review is all about highlighting the most important works, but who decides which ones deserve to be included and which don't? Of course, it is you who does it and on the basis of certain criteria, isn't it? Well, then just mention them here!

Extraction of Data / Results

This section will contain the comparison of different works on the topic, represented in a tabular form. Here you should be careful in selecting the criteria for comparison and extraction of relevant data from each source in a correct and precise manner. The table should be such that the reader should be able to comprehend the data easily.

Criteria	Process model	Tools	Methods	Frameworks	Application Domain	RE Phase
Pub 1	Agile	BugZilla	User stories	None	Web apps	Elicitation
Pub 2
Pub 3

Write a one-paragraph (2-3 sentences) summary of each paper.

Synthesis

If the literature review you are writing is a part of your research paper, then you can synthesize the information and ideas from all the works discussed in the sections above to show how your idea was called for, is relevant, or is something never thought of before. Write about the problems and challenges you found out about.

Limitations

In this section, you should mention if there have been any issues arising out of conflicting or contradictory theories on the topic, which are beyond your scope, to resolve.

Conclusion

You should conclude your literature review with suggestions concerning the scope for future research, how well you feel you handled the topic, any major difficulties you came across, etc.

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Title A Literature Review on Requirements Engineering Practice Introduction Background Requirements engineering RE is an important part of software engineering which involves understanding the needs o... View the full answer