An Instrument for Measuring the Success of the Requirements Engineering Process in Information Systems Development

There exists a strong motivation for evaluating, understanding, and improving requirements engineering practices given that a successful requirements engineering process is necessary for a successful software system. Measuring requirements engineering success is central to evaluation, understanding, and improving these practices. In this paper, a research study whose objective was to develop an instrument to measure the success of the requirements engineering process is described. The domain of this study is developing customer-specific business informaiton systems. The main result is a subjective instrument for measuring requirments engineering success. The instrument consists of 32 indicators that cover the two most important dimensions of requirments engineering success. These two dimensions were identified during the study to be: quality of requirements engineering products and quality of requirements engineering service. Evidence is presented demonstrating that the instrument has desirable psychometric properties, such as high reliability and good validity.