Human Error Management in Requirements Engineering: Should We Fix the People, the Processes, or the Environment?

Context: Software development is human-centric and therefore vulnerable to human error—failings in human thought processes that can lead to faults in requirements documents and downstream failures. Objective: Develop a taxonomy of human error prevention and mitigation strategies based on data gathered from requirements engineering professionals. Method: Perform a qualitative analysis of strategies extracted from two practitioner surveys on requirements engineering practices to identify and classify strategies for preventing and mitigating human errors. Results: Strategies are organized into a taxonomy based on whether changes primarily affect People, Processes, or the Environment, with additional low-level classes in each. Over 50% of the reported strategies require a Process change, 23% an Environment change, 21% a People change, and 5% were too ambiguous to classify. More than half of the strategies target Management activities of requirements engineering. Conclusions: The Human Error Management Taxonomy systematically classifies prevention and mitigation strategies in requirements engineering, providing a structured foundation for future research and practice.

Sweta Mahaju, Jeffrey C Carver, Gary L Bradshaw