Understanding Social and Environmental Requirements in China

Abstract

Rapid changes in the social and technical environment bring about many new challenges to system requirements engineering, amongst which out-sourcing or off-shoring of certain design tasks to countries with more human resources and broader markets becomes promising business leverage. Here we report some of the result from an ongoing research project on the survey of requirements practices in China. It is interesting to understand the current status of industrial practices after years' research efforts, especially in a rapidly developing country such as the China. We perform a web-based survey of requirements engineering practices in China, focusing on the requirement elicitation techniques and requirement presentation techniques. Our study has collected data from 150+ participants from 50+ Chinese companies and education institutes. We also analyze the impact of Chinese culture on requirement engineering practices. In this report, we present the main survey results and point out their implications. We hope our results are useful for industrial practitioners and academic researchers wishing to improve current practices, and for foreign software companies wishing to better understand their Chinese customers.