This dissertation explores facets of contemporary requirements engineering (RE) practice as they emerge in situ. Requirements-based processes have been a primary source of project distress and failure in information systems development (ISD) work. Despite more than 30 years of associated research, IS professionals and organizational managers continue to wrestle with the challenges inherent in all design undertakings: What is it that we want to create? To what constraints must our design conform? At their core, these considerations are questions about requirements.
The persistence of requirements-related difficulties in ISD is augmented by the fact that the research community has struggled to keep pace with changing contingencies within RE practice. This apparent disconnect may reflect the observation that RE research, while developing a multiplicity of formal and computational models for how to reason about requirements, has remained largely a-theoretical in its view of RE as a socio-technical endeavor. I seek to address the lack of theoretical inquiries around the socio-technical processes surrounding RE through the application of available theories of social cognition and the generation of novel theorizing. The research centers on three studies approaching RE as a socio-technical process: 1) a field study of contemporary approaches to RE; 2) an analysis of prevalent socio-technical RE challenges and mitigation approaches using grounded theory methodology and simulation; and 3) a multi-case study of RE processes focusing on their cognitively-distributed nature.
This research addresses multiple objectives, including the discernment of trends in RE, the development of novel theory around RE challenges, and the application of distributed cognition theory to integrate disparate facets of RE research. My findings suggest that socio-technical issues in RE have received limited consideration and that wider application of theoretical principles could better position RE researchers to support IS professionals in addressing the persistent challenges of the requirements undertaking.