Prompt Engineering for Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review and Roadmap
Kaicheng Huang, Fanyu Wang, Yutan Huang, Chetan Arora

TL;DR
This paper systematically reviews prompt engineering techniques for requirements engineering, proposing a taxonomy and roadmap to guide the development of reproducible, practitioner-friendly LLM-based RE workflows.
Contribution
It provides the first structured literature review and taxonomy linking prompt techniques to RE tasks, along with a practical roadmap for future development.
Findings
Identified key prompt techniques used in RE tasks
Mapped LLM families and prompt types to RE roles
Outlined research gaps and future directions
Abstract
Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of prompt engineering (PE) techniques that can enhance various requirements engineering (RE) tasks. However, current LLMs are often characterized by significant uncertainty and a lack of controllability. This absence of clear guidance on how to effectively prompt LLMs acts as a barrier to their trustworthy implementation in the RE field. We present the first roadmap-oriented systematic literature review of Prompt Engineering for RE (PE4RE). Following Kitchenham's and Petersen's secondary-study protocol, we searched six digital libraries, screened 867 records, and analyzed 35 primary studies. To bring order to a fragmented landscape, we propose a hybrid taxonomy that links technique-oriented patterns (e.g., few-shot, Chain-of-Thought) to task-oriented RE roles (elicitation, validation, traceability). Two research questions,…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices · Software Engineering Research · Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
