With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing shift away from co-located work arrangements towards working from home, practitioners encountered many collabora-tive and coordination challenges. While companies are slowly moving back towards in-person arrangements, many employers have permanently adopted fully remote and hybrid work modes. However, the work modes are more blurred, as hybrid work makes coordinating the requirements engineering practices that rely on rich interactions more challenging. Therefore, gaining more understanding of RE challenges and practices from prac-titioners transitioning to the new modes of work is imperative to identify insights that can be useful for organizations shifting to hybrid and remote work. In this paper, we use a mixed-methods approach to gain insights into remote and hybrid requirements engineering practices and challenges in the industry. Through interviews with 12 industry practitioners and a survey with 49 practitioners, we report on 7 adopted practices and 7 challenges encountered in these work arrangements. We found challenges such as organizing co-located tasks, lack of interpersonal con-nections, keeping everyone in the loop, and engagement barriers, which fall under coordination, communication and collaboration. To offset such challenges, we provide 20 recommendations based on our findings, such as proactive planning and using newer tools that support comprehensive tracking of important knowl-edge for requirements documentation. Our findings suggest that practitioners are facing challenges in remote and hybrid work arrangements, which they are mitigating with various strategies. Nonetheless, there remains a need for further research, as not all challenges are equally addressed across different work contexts.

Misalignments between stakeholders' project visions can lead to the elicitation of conflicting requirements. When these conflicts remain undetected, they can necessitate costly changes in late stages of the development process. One approach to avoid such conflicts are so-called vision videos. Vision videos present the project vision held by the stakeholders that create the vision videos. By watching a video created by their peers, stakeholders can detect and resolve misalignments between their project vision and the one presented in the video. Thus far, research has focused on how to create vision videos. Research on how to watch and use a vision video for requirements validation has been limited. If vision videos are created with care, but used without consideration, their full potential may be lost. In this paper, we aim to lay the groundwork for future research on the usage of vision videos by conducting an exploratory study with 128 students working in 21 project teams. Each team used vision videos to align their project vision with those of their customers. Based on this study, we identify 5 possible research avenues and present corresponding research questions. In doing so, we pave the way towards an effective usage of vision videos.

Abstract The benefits of traceability have widely been discussed in research. However, studies have also shown that traceability practices are still not prevalent in industrial settings due to the high manual effort and lack of tool support. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using eye tracking to automatically detect trace links to reduce manual effort and thereby increase practical applicability. We conducted a two-stage interview study in industry. In Stage 1 we interviewed 20 practitioners to provide an overview of how traceability is established in practice and how an eye tracking approach would need to be applied in order to be useful. In Stage 2 we conducted interviews with 16 practitioners from one project context to elicit role-specific workflows and analyzed which activities are suitable to obtain useful traceability links based on gaze data. As there is no one-fits-all solution to traceability, and technical limitations of eye tracking still exist, we collected information on used artifact types, tools and requirements management practices to adjust an approach to actual traceability stakeholders’ needs. We report on perspectives from different roles in software projects and give an overview of traced artifacts, current traceability experiences, as well as benefits and doubts concerned with using eye tracking to obtain links automatically. We discuss the implications for the evaluation and implementation of an automatic tracing approach in practice and how eye tracking can support requirements engineering activities.

Abstract The success of software projects depends on developing a system that satisfies the stakeholders’ wishes and needs according to their mental models of the intended system. However, stakeholders may have misaligned mental models of the same system, resulting in conflicting requirements. For this reason, a shared understanding of the project vision is essential for the success of software projects. While it is already challenging to achieve shared understanding in synchronous contexts, such as meetings, it is even more challenging when only asynchronous contexts, like messaging services, are possible. When multiple stakeholders are involved from different locations and time zones, primarily asynchronous communication occurs. The use of asynchronous communication tools for the development of a shared understanding has hardly been analyzed. In this paper, we look to turn the potential detriment of having to discuss a project vision asynchronously into an opportunity for stakeholders to achieve a shared understanding. For this purpose, we give an overview of common challenges of asynchronous communication. We also propose five concepts designed to minimize the impact of these challenges. We examine categories of asynchronous communication tools and assess their adaptability to our concepts. In a workshop, we chose three most suited representatives to include in our main experiment. In this experiment, we evaluate the adapted representatives and a prototype of our own with 30 participants. Our results show the suitability of our concepts. Participants using our concepts were able to achieve a higher level of shared understanding.

The benefits of traceability have widely been discussed in research. However, studies have also shown that traceability practices are still hardly established in industrial settings due to the high manual effort and lack of tool support. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using eye tracking to automatically detect trace links to reduce manual effort and thereby increase practical applicability. We conducted an interview study with 20 practitioners to give an overview of traceability practices in industry and how an eye tracking approach would need to be applied in order to be useful. As there is no one-fits-all solution to traceability, and technical limitations of eye tracking still exist, we collected information on used artifact types, tools and requirements management practices to adjust an approach to actual traceability stakeholders' needs. We report on perspectives from different roles in software projects and give an overview of traced artifacts, current traceability purposes and issues, as well as benefits and doubts concerned with using eye tracking to obtain links automatically. We discuss the implications for the implementation of an automatic tracing approach in practice and how eye tracking can support requirements engineering activities.

Abstract The creation of a shared understanding of the project vision of all relevant stakeholders is vital to the requirements engineering process. One way to create such a shared understanding is through the use of vision videos that visualize the project vision at an early project stage. However, not all functional aspects can be presented. For example, the fact that an access code is valid for only a single use can be hard to visualize. One low-effort solution could be the insertion of short texts or short audio clips. In this work, our question is twofold: What effects do short pieces of additional information have in vision videos? What are suitable ways to add this information to vision videos? To answer these research questions, we investigated three different methods of inserting additional information to vision videos in an eye tracking study. We inserted short texts either below the scene or as overlays and also investigated the addition of short audio clips. These methods were evaluated in terms of participants’ video comprehension, visual effort, cognitive load and subjective preference. The results of our study show that the pieces of additional information improve vision comprehension, thereby supporting the creation of a shared understanding. All investigated methods lead to only marginal increases of the viewers’ cognitive load. Based on our results, we derive recommendations on how to insert additional information in vision videos.

One main goal of requirements engineering is ensuring that all stakeholders share the same vision of the future system. Vision Videos can be used for this purpose. They visualize the product vision at an early stage of the project. However, some functional aspects, such as an access code being valid only once, are difficult to visualize. Short texts could be a low-effort solution to complement videos with additional information. Thus, represented visions and requirements could be taken to the next level of clarification. Our question is two-fold: What effects do texts have in vision videos? What are suitable ways to add textual information to vision videos? We conducted an eye tracking study to investigate the effects of adding short texts to vision videos, either below the scene or as text overlays. We evaluated these two methods regarding video comprehension, reading time, cognitive load and subjective preference. Our study shows that texts in vision videos improve vision comprehension and thus support the achievement of one requirements engineering goal. Both methods increase the cognitive load of viewers only by a reasonable margin. No clear-cut preference for a single variant was found. We derive recommendations on how to add texts to vision videos.

Software engineers in modern development settings often face the challenge of contributing to large existing projects. The comprehension of foreign software code presents a time consuming obstacle, especially in contexts like onboarding. New employees have little knowledge of the software project they are supposed to contribute to. Therefore, tools supporting developers with their code comprehension are desirable to help them contribute to the best of their ability as soon as possible. Such tools must be flexible enough to work with any software project, while offering means for adjustments to very specific tasks.In this paper, we present an approach to visualize source code as node-link diagrams, using expert-designed ontologies to group various source code elements such as classes or methods. We evaluate our approach with nine advanced computer science students simulating an onboarding in a software project consisting of almost 100k lines of code. The results show that our approach supports code comprehension by utilizing expert knowledge of the visualized project, while also pointing to other use cases such as legacy code migration.