Requirements Engineering for Industrial Systems: No Easy Answers

Requirements engineering (RE) for complex industrial systems can defy traditional processes and tooling. Some topics, such as managing requirements for contract based and regulated systems are rarely mentioned in the literature. Market forces such as increased staff turnover and reduced development times are changing the way products and services are defined. Other issues, such as eliciting, analyzing, and managing tens or hundreds of thousands of requirements effectively and efficiently, remain, to a large extent, intractable. Some RE activities, such as the tracing of cross-cutting requirements are a conundrum looking for a solution. In some cases, the techniques that do work have evolved over time through trial and error. In general, however, RE processes and tooling on large industrial projects, such as major infrastructure works, have a ways to go before they can be considered standard practices. Described below are some of the more intractable problems in the engineering of industrial systems.