  The various influences in the processes and application domains make
Requirements Engineering (RE) inherently complex and difficult to implement. In
general, we have two options for establishing an RE approach: we can either
establish an activity-based RE approach or we can establish an artefact-based
one where project participants concentrate on the RE artefacts rather than on
the way of creating them. While a number of activity-based RE approaches have
been proposed in recent years, we have gained much empirical evidence and
experiences about the advantages of the artefact-based paradigm for RE.
However, artefact orientation is still a young paradigm with various
interpretations and practical manifestations whereby we need a clear
understanding of its basic concepts and a consolidated and evaluated view on
the paradigm.
  In this article, we contribute an artefact-based approach to RE (AMDiRE) that
emerges from six years of experiences in fundamental and evidence-based
research. To this end, we first discuss the basic notion of artefact
orientation and its evolution in recent years. We briefly introduce a set of
artefact-based RE models we developed in industrial research cooperations for
different application domains, show their empirical evaluations, and their
dissemination into academia and practice, eventually leading to the AMDiRE
approach. We conclude with a discussion of experiences we made during the
development and different industrial evaluations, and lessons learnt.
