Two Integration Pathways in Human-Centered Requirements Engineering: A Systematic Mapping Study of Structural Gaps

TL;DR

This systematic mapping study identifies two parallel integration pathways in human-centered requirements engineering, highlighting their structural gaps, and proposes a research agenda to bridge these gaps and operationalize user experience.

Contribution

It reveals the structural separation between two main pathways in HC-RE and provides a structured research agenda to bridge the gap and advance the field.

Findings

70% of approaches involve multidisciplinary contributions

Only 39% of approaches have been empirically evaluated

48% of approaches address only the elicitation phase

Abstract

Human-centered Requirements Engineering (HC-RE) integrates user cognition, emotions, and social interactions into the RE process through contributions from disciplines such as psychology, cognitive science, design thinking, and human-computer interaction. Despite growing interest, how these multidisciplinary contributions are structured and why they remain fragmented across the RE lifecycle is not well understood. This systematic mapping study analyzes 56 primary studies across seven dimensions, including RE phases, user involvement techniques, contributing disciplines, and evaluation methods. Results show that 70\% of approaches involve multidisciplinary contributions, yet only 39% have been empirically evaluated and 48% address only the elicitation phase. A cross-study analysis reveals a structural separation between two parallel integration traditions: a Cognitive-Formal (C-F) pathway grounded in goal-based frameworks and formal modeling, and a Participatory-Iterative (P-I) pathway grounded in scenario-based frameworks and iterative design. Each pathway has developed complementary strengths, but their near-total disconnection explains the persistent lifecycle concentration and theory-practice gap observed in the corpus. The findings identify the absence of translation mechanisms between human-centered artifacts and formal RE specifications as the field's primary structural gap, provide a structured research agenda organized into four priority tiers, and establish the empirical foundation for Experience-Centered Requirements Engineering, a direction in which user experience is explicitly operationalized as a first-class concern in requirements specification.