What are the current challenges and trends in requirements engineering research?

One of the ways to ensure changes to requirements are minimum for mega projects such as a new rail line that tend to have large project timescales, is to ensure you have undergone a systematic horizon scanning with key stakeholders. It is vital to understand key drivers of success at operational phase especially for mega projects at the earliest, this will help in ensuring the system specification is future proofed.

Fazil's comment here makes a lot of sense. Stakeholder management is key. One has to check alignment on scope limits, ie what is not going to be delivered. It should be listed as requirements as well. Hard conversations at times, especially when budget constraints are tights. Another key part of stakeholder management is change management. This is where one needs a Project Manager who is able to stand their ground with lots of diplomacy when someone asks for more! Continuous person-to-person communication is key, with transparency, listening and discipline.

We are in VUCA World and the nature and needs of users become different and some times they don't know what exactly the requirements of service or product they want to deliver so a lot of discovery and research work should be done at early stages.

Complexity and scale are common companions! In my experience, one needs a sensible balance between scope breakdown granularity and teams communications (which includes information sharing). Finer granularity reduces complexity, but requires more frequent synchronizations between teams. That's why one needs tools where: 1. granularity is entirely flexible, ie one should be able to create dedicated workspaces for each scope item or team, 2. links between workspaces are "live", ie information is reused and shared rather than replicated, 3. design and verification is progressive, ie each design iteration yields their requirements and justifications, before moving on to the next complexity step.

For sure, one needs to capture user-centered requirements. In my opinion, one also has to give feedback to user as early as possible. Tell them what has become of requirements even before development starts. So one needs tools where design team can generate user-centric views with initial requirements alongside their interpretation by the team. The tool needs to allow user to give feedback, comments, if not approval.

One interesting example of this is the integration of ChatGPT into Confluence which enables faster content creation. Jama Connect also has natural language processing capabilities that help BAs and Requirement Engineers write concise and impactful requirements.