  Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical discipline mostly driven by
uncertainty, since it is influenced by the customer domain or by the
development process model used. We aim to investigate RE processes in
successful project environments to discover characteristics and strategies that
allow us to elaborate RE tailoring approaches in the future. We perform a field
study on a set of projects at one company. First, we investigate by content
analysis which RE artefacts were produced in each project and to what extent
they were produced. Second, we perform qualitative analysis of semi-structured
interviews to discover project parameters that relate to the produced
artefacts. Third, we use cluster analysis to infer artefact patterns and
probable RE execution strategies, which are the responses to specific project
parameters. Fourth, we investigate by statistical tests the effort spent in
each strategy in relation to the effort spent in change requests to evaluate
the efficiency of execution strategies. Our results show no statistically
significant difference between the efficiency of the strategies. In addition,
it turned out that many parameters considered as the main causes for project
failures can be successfully handled. Hence, practitioners can apply the
artefact patterns and related project parameters to tailor the RE process
according to individual project characteristics.
