Requirements Engineering for Enterprise Systems: What We Know and What We Don’t Know? - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 116

Figure 1 indicates the number of papers, that have been published in (RE-
related) journals and conferences and that include one of the strings “Requirements
Engineering”, “ERP”, “Enterprise System”, “Supply Chain Management System”,
“Business-to-Business Systems”, “COTS”, “Customer Relationship Management
System” either in their title, or in their abstract. As Fig. 1 indicates, we found that
the number of papers published between 1996 and 2010 grew up from 5 to 201.
For the purpose of this chapter, we applied the following process of reviewing the
content of these publications:

1. We merged the results of the search in the three databases and then eliminated
from the resulting list those papers which were only remotely connected to the
topics of eliciting and modeling requirements in ES projects.
2. The remaining papers were classified in two groups based on the two RE sub-
areas which we deal with in this chapter (namely, elicitation and modeling).
3. We took notes on the key ideas included in the approaches from the papers that
we classified in step (2) and on the practical application of the approaches.

We make the note that we did not go further to assess the actual evidence regard-
ing the value of the proposed approaches, because our goals in this chapter are to
take a snapshot view of the RE-for-ES field and to complement it with our cur-
rent knowledge of market changes and, then, shortlist an initial agenda for future
research.
Our merging of the search results in each database yielded a total of 110 papers,
out of which we considered 53 for inclusion in this chapter. The specific aspects
which we identified in these publications and which we selected for discussion in
this chapter are listed as follows:

• requirements elicitation (Sect. 3.1), which is concerned with finding, communi-

cation and validation of facts and rules about the business,

• requirements modeling (Sect. 3.2), which is concerned with the business pro-

cesses and data representation and analysis of the gap between the enterprise
requirements and the package functionality, and

• type of empirical evaluation of the requirements elicitation and modeling

approaches (Sect. 3.3), which is to understand (based on the RE publication
authors' claims) those ideas that worked in real-life settings.

As the readers can expect, one can identify a number of overlapping aspects that
pertain to elicitation and modeling of requirements in ES projects. However, we
think that our classification of the RE approaches observable in the literature, is
good enough for the goals of this chapter as we search for indicative observations.
With this, we mean observations (i) that pertain to the state-of-the-art in RE research
or practice and (ii) that suggest themes worthwhile investing our research efforts in
the future.