An Empirical Analysis of the Usage of Requirements Attributes in Requirements Engineering Research and Practice

Requirements attributes play an important role in storing and managing meta-information about requirements. This paper presents the results of a literature review and two industrial case studies performed at two large organizations developing software-intensive products for a global market. We performed seven snowballing iterations and identified 18 studies where we extracted requirements attributes. Next, we compare these identified attributes with those of two large companies developing software-intensive products for a global market. We found common attributes that describe stakeholders and roles, support change management, tracing and communication, tracking the status, and estimating the business value of requirements.