Prompt Engineering for Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review and Roadmap

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Huang, Kaicheng, Wang, Fanyu, Huang, Yutan, Arora, Chetan
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Huang, Kaicheng
Wang, Fanyu
Huang, Yutan
Arora, Chetan
author_facet Huang, Kaicheng
Wang, Fanyu
Huang, Yutan
Arora, Chetan
contents Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of prompt engineering (PE) techniques that can enhance various requirements engineering (RE) tasks. However, current LLMs are often characterized by significant uncertainty and a lack of controllability. This absence of clear guidance on how to effectively prompt LLMs acts as a barrier to their trustworthy implementation in the RE field. We present the first roadmap-oriented systematic literature review of Prompt Engineering for RE (PE4RE). Following Kitchenham's and Petersen's secondary-study protocol, we searched six digital libraries, screened 867 records, and analyzed 35 primary studies. To bring order to a fragmented landscape, we propose a hybrid taxonomy that links technique-oriented patterns (e.g., few-shot, Chain-of-Thought) to task-oriented RE roles (elicitation, validation, traceability). Two research questions, with five sub-questions, map the tasks addressed, LLM families used, and prompt types adopted, and expose current limitations and research gaps. Finally, we outline a step-by-step roadmap showing how today's ad-hoc PE prototypes can evolve into reproducible, practitioner-friendly workflows.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_07682
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prompt Engineering for Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review and Roadmap
Huang, Kaicheng
Wang, Fanyu
Huang, Yutan
Arora, Chetan
Software Engineering
Advancements in large language models (LLMs) have led to a surge of prompt engineering (PE) techniques that can enhance various requirements engineering (RE) tasks. However, current LLMs are often characterized by significant uncertainty and a lack of controllability. This absence of clear guidance on how to effectively prompt LLMs acts as a barrier to their trustworthy implementation in the RE field. We present the first roadmap-oriented systematic literature review of Prompt Engineering for RE (PE4RE). Following Kitchenham's and Petersen's secondary-study protocol, we searched six digital libraries, screened 867 records, and analyzed 35 primary studies. To bring order to a fragmented landscape, we propose a hybrid taxonomy that links technique-oriented patterns (e.g., few-shot, Chain-of-Thought) to task-oriented RE roles (elicitation, validation, traceability). Two research questions, with five sub-questions, map the tasks addressed, LLM families used, and prompt types adopted, and expose current limitations and research gaps. Finally, we outline a step-by-step roadmap showing how today's ad-hoc PE prototypes can evolve into reproducible, practitioner-friendly workflows.
title Prompt Engineering for Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review and Roadmap
topic Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07682