What you need is what you get!: The vision of view-based requirements specifications

Software requirements specifications play a crucial role in software development projects. Especially in large projects, these specifications serve as a source of communication and information for a variety of roles involved in downstream activities like architecture, design, and testing. This vision paper argues that in order to create high-quality requirements specifications that fit the specific demands of successive document stakeholders, our research community needs to better understand the particular information needs of downstream development roles. In this paper, the authors introduce the idea of view-based requirements specifications. Two scenarios illustrate (1) current problems and challenges related to the research underlying the envisioned idea and (2) how these problems could be solved in the future. Based on these scenarios, challenges and research questions are outlined and supplemented with current results of exemplary user studies. Furthermore, potential future research is suggested, which the community should perform to answer the research questions as part of a research agenda.