Status report: requirements engineering

It is argued that, in general, requirements engineering produces one large document, written in a natural language, that few people bother to read. Projects that do read and follow the document often build systems that do not satisfy needs. The reasons for the current state of the practice are listed. Research areas that have significant payoff potential, including improving natural-language specifications, rapid prototyping and requirements animation, requirements clustering, requirements-based testing, computer-aided requirements engineering, requirements reuse, research into methods, knowledge engineering, formal methods, and a unified framework, are outlined.<>