Towards Cycle-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Product Service Systems (PSS) – a combination of software, hardware and service elements – are an emerging trend on the market. Their development encounters different difficulties, amongst them the existence of dynamic cyclic interdependencies. These cycles make the challenging requirements engineering (RE) for PSS even more complicated. Up to now there is no integrated RE approach for PSS. An important step in developing such an approach is to understand the effects of cycles on RE. In this paper the cycles and their causes are analyzed by an industrial case study, a literature review, and by expert interviews. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, a detailed explanation of cycles’ causes emerging in the development and RE of PSS is given and the effects of the resulting cycles on RE are elaborated. Second, a list of requirements to RE for PSS is derived, which describes how the cycles can be managed adequately.