Revisiting the challenges in aligning RE and V&V: Experiences from the public sector

Successful coordination of Requirements Engineering and Testing (RET) is crucial in large-scale software engineering. If the activities involved in RET are not aligned, effort is inevitably wasted, and the probability of delivering high quality software products in time decreases. Previous work has identified sixteen challenges in aligning RET in a case study of six companies. However, all six case companies selected for the study are active in proprietary software engineering. In this experience report, we discuss to what extent the identified RET alignment challenges apply to the development of a large information system for managing grants from the European Union. We confirm that most of the findings from previous work also apply to the public sector, including the challenges of aligning goals within an organization, specifying high-quality requirements, and verifying quality aspects. Furthermore, we emphasize that the public sector might be impacted by shifting political power, and that several RET alignment challenges are amplified in multi-project environments.