Challenges in Requirements Engineering for a Platform group: Case Study with a Medical Imaging Platform

Requirements engineering is an essential phase in the software engineering lifecycle, more so for a software platform. In addition to the conventional requirements engineering challenges, software platforms should address issues such as: (1) handling the continuous inflow of requirements from various application groups, (2) align to the roadmaps of the various product groups, (3) striking a balance between catering to the cutting edge features while being backward compatible with existing features. This paper attempts to identify such requirements engineering challenges that are highly prevalent for a software platform and explain why traditional requirements engineering techniques alone cannot handle these issues. The paper also outlines the creative approaches taken by the platform group at Philips Medical Systems to address these challenges. It also lists out the lessons learnt in the process and the open issues that we would like to handle in the near future