Complete thesis - Murdoch University

If marketing can tell you what they want and you can write downwhat they say (or better yet, have them write down what theywant), the you’re done.And the situation will never get better, no matter how many RE books and articleswe write and now matter how many classes are taught until a significant part of theindustry realizes that there is more to RE than that.And even when a RE technique like use case modeling becomespopular enough to get on the radar screen of many developers andtheir management, there is little progress because there islittle consistency in practice (or even in the literature) as towhat the technique really is or how it should be used. Progressis very slow when everyone is so busy on real projects doingtheir own job that they have little time, energy, or incentiveto even keep up with their own discipline, and even less tolearn another discipline such as RE. Besides, to the softwareengineer and manager, RE is not as exciting, interesting, orprestegious as their own fields. RE is a little like qualityengineering, someone has got to do it, but few want to do it.Also,RE requires a difficult mixture of social and technical skills and abilities that few have.So, is it any wonder that RE in practice is in such terrible shape.It is not that we need major academic advances in RE that won’t be put into practiceanyway, at least not in the future. What we really need is to put into practice whatwe’ve already known for years and years. And that is a social, psychological, political,financial, business, and educational problem, not a technical one. But the technicalproblems are the most interesting and fun problems to solve, so that is where most ofthe effort has and will be placed. And we will all be complaining about the terrible stateof requirements engineering in practice ten years from now.So what can we do? What we’ve always done. We have an ethical42