Requirements engineering process improvement: Analyzing the organizational culture impact and implementing an empirical study to evaluate the benefits of improvement

This paper describes an industrial experience of requirements engineering for the business process improvement in one of the biggest electronics companies in Korea. To improve the definition of the TV department business process requirements, we have applied a few methods to facilitate communications amongst stakeholders, based on their requirements. Our methods include iterative review processes, shared templates, and professional technical writing training. After applying our methods in a pilot project, the project stakeholders have confirmed that the approach provides a better requirements understanding and has improved requirements elicitation for the given examples. While implementing the project, we were also able to learn about both technical and nontechnical obstacles. Nontechnical obstacles were created by the organizational culture, including issues such as reduced empowerment, low levels of communication with other stakeholders, and a non-uniformly defined and not clearly understood mission statement. Most of the developers are very good at accomplishing their goals. They are very quick to respond to their management´s requests, without excuses. However, often times, stakeholders have usually emphasized the importance of the results, rather than focusing on developing a strong quality process. The quality of work was highly dependent on the product development process. Therefore, in this study, the authors have analyzed the impact on the requirements gathering created by the stakeholders having a manufacturing process background and evaluating most decisions from a manufacturing perspective. The impact of the national cultural work style on the requirements engineering processes was also examined. In the future, we will continue to apply and expand the mentioned findings to further improve the requirements business process management.