Requirements Mean Decisions! – Research issues for understanding and supporting decision-making in Requirements Engineering

Requirements result from stakeholders’ decisions. These decisions are governed by hard issues such as the balance between cost and functionality, and soft issues such as social processes and organisational politics. The quality of the decision-making process is crucial as good-enough requirements is the foundation for a successful focusing of the available development resources. In this paper it is argued that research should focus more on Requirements Engineering (RE) as a decision-making process with focus on describing and understanding it, and on providing and evaluating methods to improve and support RE decisionmaking. There are many opportunities of fruitful interdisciplinary research when combining RE with areas such as decision theory, decision support systems, operations research and management science. A number of research issues are identified and several aspects of RE decisionmaking are described, with the aim of promoting research on methods which can better support requirements engineers in their decision-making.