Requirements Engineering Practices for Developing Enterprise Virtual Reality Software Products

Abstract

Virtual Reality (VR) is an emerging technology that is gaining traction across various domains in the past decade. Mainstream adoption is still work in progress, especially in enterprise domains like health care, manufacturing, construction, Defence, National Security, etc. Building VR technology has its own set of challenges. Challenges like volatile hardware, low computation capacity, trademark monopolies, hyper-enthusiastic user base, lack of evident domain expertise, and lack of structured processes within the developer ecosystem, have been encountered by the VR Enterprise and Consumer community over the years. These challenges require thorough investigation to understand the state-of-the-art approaches and formulate better solutions to optimally utilize VR technology. To comprehend the development practices adopted while building VR software products, we conducted an year-long multi-level exploratory study with the VR Enterprise developer community worldwide. As part of this empirical study, we observed a wide range of strategies, methodologies, approaches, and models embraced by the VR practitioners while building new-age VR software products at various stages of VR product development (including requirements gathering, VR product design, software toolkits, VR product quality, VR product release, and reuse). The major observations from the empirical study being: (1) conventional software engineering practices are force-fitted and practiced to manage overall VR products (2) modified conventional approaches that deal with specific software problems are embraced as alternate solutions to VR problems (3) most of the VR Enterprise community have their antecedents in gaming industry (4) VR Enterprise suffers from hardware and software cross-platform support and portability issues (5) development cost of the overall VR product will spike if development practices are altered during VR product development and (6), requirements engineering, software quality (specifically usability), security, and lack of open-source software tools are the thrust areas for immediate advancement. Research support is needed to improve and introduce VR enterprisecentered approaches to produce high quality VR software products and to reduce development costs. After studying the development practices of the VR Enterprise, we looked at relevant literature. We reviewed academic research on Requirements Engineering methods, Software Quality, and Software Usability methods for VR product development. Academic methods focus on conventional software development. They do not consider the realities of VR Enterprise practices. Literature shows poor requirements engineering practices negatively impact VR product development. Rigorous, enterpriseoriented requirement methods could help mitigate VR software quality issues. The primary motive of this thesis is to discuss the need for rigorous requirements engineering for VR product development. We present a novel tool-based approach to specifying requirements for VR products using a conceptual understanding of VR as a domain. We formulate a “Role-based model template” for a VR software system that provides a meta-model understanding of VR as a domain. The model template of the VR software system illustrates the bare minimum concepts and the underlying attributes required to build a minimalistic VR software product. The model template can be customized by the VR development community without altering its bare minimum concepts and attributes. This allows mechanisms to ease overall VR development and overcome being tied to specific VR hardware and software development (s). Further, we developed VReqST - a requirement specification tool for VR requirement analysts to formally elicit, analyze, and specify requirements based on the role-based model template. VReqST can be used by VR designers to eventually design VR scene templates with higher precision. VR developers can avoid imagination stress by relying on these design templates. VReqST-based requirement specifications enable traceability, reusability, and incorporate quality requirements in VR product development. To understand VReqST’s practical influence, we had the VR Enterprise adopt and provide feedback on it. Their systematic, iterative feedback helped improve the tool with developer-friendly features and enhancements. As proof-of-concept, we also used VReqST to specify requirements for a real-time VR depression detection application. As a future work, we envision expanding VReqST’s capabilities to serve as an input for Generative AI tools, aiding in the various stages of development of VR software and facilitating model-driven development approaches for VR products.