Abstract:

Requirements engineering is a major challenge for software developers. The interaction with stakeholders in order to specify the needs that the software product must satisfy, requires an effort to adopt good and successful practices. This study intends to show the reality of the software industry in Latin America with respect to the requirements engineering. For this, an empirical study was carried out through surveys and interviews with 35 software development companies. The results show that interviews and use cases are the requirements elicitation and analysis techniques most used. In addition, they show a low adoption of formal documentation techniques, tools and formal methodologies. This study shows trends of adoption that can be contrasted with the scientific proposals.