Understanding and supporting large-scale requirements management

Large market-driven software companies face new challenges in requirements
engineering and management that emerged due to their recent extensive
growth. At the same time, the pressure generated by competitors’
and users’ expectations demands being more competitive, creative and
flexible to more quickly respond to a rapidly changing market situation.
In the pursuit of staying competitive in this context, new ideas on how
to improve the current software engineering practice are requested to help
maintaining the engineering efficiency while coping with growing size and
complexity of requirements engineering processes and their products.
This thesis focuses on understanding and supporting large-scale requirements
management for developing software products to open markets.
In particular, this thesis focuses on the following requirements management
activities in the mentioned context, namely: scope management,
variability management and requirements consolidation. The goals of the
research effort in this thesis are to provide effective methods in supporting
mentioned requirements management activities in a situation when the
size of them and their complexity require large time and skills efforts.
Based on empirical research, where both quantitative and qualitative
approaches were utilized, this thesis reports on possible improvements for
managing variability and presents visualization techniques to assist scope
management for large-scale software product development contexts. Both
reported ideas are empirically evaluated in case studies in a large-scale
context. Additionally, the benefits of using linguistic methods for requirements
consolidation are investigated in a replicated experimental study
based on a relevant industry scenario.