Training Industry Practitioners to Investigate the Human Error Causes of Requirements Faults

This paper reports an industrial study that was conducted to evaluate whether human error training procedures and instrumentation created by authors can be used to train industry software practitioners on human errors that occur during requirements engineering process. Industry practitioners were trained (using an on-line audio-visual package) to analyze requirements faults and map them to underlying human errors (i.e., the root causes of faults). Results of the study show that even though our training helped practitioners in gaining knowledge about requirements phase human errors, parts of the training procedures need to be improved. Additionally, practitioners also reported mechanisms to prevent human errors from happening during the requirements engineering process. These mechanisms can help organizations create interventions (like checklists) that can help software developers avoid committing human errors, thereby preventing faults that are caused due to these errors.