The impact of GenAI on the future of requirements engineering
TL;DR
The state of the art in AI for requirements engineering research leading up to the transformation, before reviewing advances in LLMs, and two subsequent research areas: prompt programming and generalist SE agents, which combine multiple LLM advances to yield semi-autonomous processes that complete SE tasks.
Abstract
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly large language models (LLMs), are transforming how we design and build systems by increasing access to domain knowledge and by providing automation support to software engineering (SE). As implementation becomes less expensive through generalist SE agents, engineering effort shifts away from writing correct code and toward expressing, curating, verifying, and evaluating requirements. In this paper, we survey the state of the art in AI for requirements engineering (RE) research leading up to the transformation, before reviewing advances in LLMs. We survey two subsequent research areas: prompt programming, which treats LLM instructions as a program in SE vernacular, and generalist SE agents, which combine multiple LLM advances to yield semi-autonomous processes that complete SE tasks. Finally, we explore the future of requirements engineering along two axes: matters changing how we interact with requirements through the SE process, and matters changing how requirements are experienced by software developers and stakeholders more broadly, including end-users. This article aims to inform how RE researchers can navigate this transformation in the selection of future research priorities.
