Video Based Requirements Engineering

Problems with Requirements Engineering

With the evolution of software systems, the types of computing tasks are no longer limited to scientific computing and transactions batch processing; instead software systems nowadays have to process diverse tasks across different domains and deal with many real-world modeling problems. As the software systems become more and more complicated, software engineers are expected to better understand real-world problems at the beginning of software projects to avoid late and hence expensive changes. That is why requirements engineering is playing a more and more important role in software engineering. "Inadequate, inconsistent, incomplete, or ambiguous requirements are numerous and have a critical impact on the quality of the resulting software."

Video Based Requirements Engineering

Among all challenges in Requirements Engineering, communication is the most significant one. Generally the engineers and the customers have different technical backgrounds, use different sets of terminology and observe things from different points of view. That explains why traditional text-based scenario descriptions do not work well and often create misunderstandings during requirements engineering. Video-Based Requirements Engineering (VBRE) is a new way to describe scenarios. Instead of text, videos are used as the medium for describing scenarios and as the communication mechanism among stakeholders including engineers, customers and end users. Compared to text, videos have the advantages of lucidity, intuitiveness and free of ambiguity. The steps of VBRE are: 1) pre-production for a visionary scenario; 2) collect user feedback; 3) improve the video and 4) post-production. It is worth noting that this is an iterative process like other scenario-based design approaches.