Towards an understanding of benefits and challenges in the use of design thinking in requirements engineering

Agile approaches arose as a way of addressing some of the main challenges in software development. Some of the challenges are changing requirements, lack of understanding about the system's scope, and out-of-sync between code, requirements, and documentation. Software companies' professionals have adopted Design Thinking (DT) to support software development to understand better what customers want, fostering the creation of features and products. Due to the importance of requirement engineering to software development success, this study aimed to characterize what DT benefits and challenges were perceived in requirements engineering by the Brazilian software development community. The current study used mixed methods combining two qualitative methods, a focus group to collect and understand the professionals' DT usage opinions and a survey to confirm the professionals' challenges and benefits. This study identified that DT has helped the professionals improve the requirements gathering and specification, reflecting on better users' real needs understanding and building fittable solutions to support them. The results serve to understand better DT potential, perceived by software industry professionals, to anticipate and support these issues with other professionals.