  Background: Requirement engineering is often considered a critical activity
in system development projects. The increasing complexity of software, as well
as number and heterogeneity of stakeholders, motivate the development of
methods and tools for improving large-scale requirement engineering. Aims: The
empirical study presented in this paper aims to identify and understand the
characteristics and challenges of a platform, as desired by experts, to support
requirement engineering for individual stakeholders, based on the current
pain-points of their organizations when dealing with a large number
requirements. Method: We conducted a multiple case study with three companies
in different domains. We collected data through ten semi-structured interviews
with experts from these companies. Results: The main pain-point for
stakeholders is handling the vast amount of data from different sources. The
foreseen platform should leverage such data to manage changes in requirements
according to customers' and users' preferences. It should also offer
stakeholders an estimation of how long a requirements engineering task will
take to complete, along with an easier requirements dependency identification
and requirements reuse strategy. Conclusions: The findings provide empirical
evidence about how practitioners wish to improve their requirement engineering
processes and tools. The insights are a starting point for in-depth
investigations into the problems and solutions presented. Practitioners can use
the results to improve existing or design new practices and tools.
