Bridging Stakeholder and Product Requirements: An Empirical Study of Requirement Engineering in the Automotive Industry

Abstract

The automotive industry's shift toward software-driven systems has increased system complexity and raised the importance of effective requirement intake and refinement for correctness, compliance, development speed, and systematic reuse. Although prior research has proposed techniques for improving requirement quality, limited empirical evidence exists on how stakeholder-level requirements are evaluated, refined, and transformed into product-level requirements in industrial automotive practice. This paper presents a large-scale empirical study based on an industrial dataset from Infineon, comprising 8,082 stakeholder requirements and 5,870 product requirements enriched with traceability links, decision outcomes, deviation rationales, and domain references. Using a mixed-methods approach, we combine quantitative analyses of requirement structures, decision distributions, and mapping patterns with qualitative analyses of rationales, referenced specifications, and software- and hardware-related artifacts. We investigate structural and contextual differences between stakeholder and product requirements, factors influencing acceptance, rejection, and approval with deviation, and the nature of stakeholder-to-product refinement. The results reveal systematic differences across abstraction levels and show that refinement complexity is driven primarily by architectural scope and missing contextual information rather than linguistic verbosity. We further derive a taxonomy of stakeholder-product mapping patterns and relate these patterns to differing refinement effort. The findings provide concrete insight into industrial requirements intake and refinement practices and identify actionable opportunities for improving intake validation, deviation management, and tool-supported contextual enrichment to support faster and more reusable automotive product development.