The Importance of Professional Quality of Requirements Analysts for Success of Software Development Projects: A Study to Identify the Most Relevant Skills

The software industry is becoming increasingly important and complex, demanding investment of software organizations in the quality of their software processes. Requirements Engineering is one of the disciplines that can help software organizations to deal with this scenario, specially defining initiatives that can improve the requirements elicitation and analysis activities. In order to contribute to this context and considering the relevance of human resources to software development, a survey was conducted to identify and prioritize the personal skills necessary for requirements analysts to do their jobs effectively, and to evaluate them. Project managers answered the questionnaires, evaluating thirty three personal skills taken from the literature. We compared the results obtained with the literature. In addition, a qualitative study was conducted to deepen the work, using semi-structured interviews with project managers. The qualitative analysis was based on procedures of the Grounded Theory method. The result of this work can be used as a guide for recruitment, selection and performance evaluations of requirements analysts.