Requirement Engineering Challenges in Development of Software Applications and Selection of Customer-off-the-Shelf (COTS) Components

Requirement Engineering acts as foundation for any software and is one of the most important tasks. Entire software is supported by four pillars of requirement engineering processes. Functional and non-functional requirements work as bricks to support software edifice. Finally, design, implementation and testing add stories to construct entire software tower on top of this foundation. Thus, the base needs to be well-built to support rest of software tower. For this purpose, requirement engineers come across with numerous challenges to develop successful software. The paper has highlighted requirement engineering challenges encountered in development of software applications and selection of right customer-off-the-shelf components (COTS). Comprehending stakeholder’s needs; incomplete and inconsistent process description; verification and validation of requirements; classification and modeling of extensive data; selection of COTS product with minimum requirement modifications are foremost challenges faced during requirement engineering. Moreover, the paper has discussed and critically evaluated challenges highlighted by various researchers. Besides, the paper presents a model that encapsulates seven major challenges that recur during requirement engineering phase. These challenges have been further categorized into problems. Furthermore, the model has been linked with previous research work to elaborate challenges that have not been specified earlier. Anticipating requirement engineering challenges could assist requirement engineers to prevent software tower from any destruction.