Handshaking between software projects and stakeholders using implementation proposals

Abstract

Handshaking between product management and R&D is key to the success of product development projects. Traditional requirements engineering processes build on good quality requirements specifications, which typically are not achievable in practical circumstances, especially not in distributed development where daily communication cannot easily be achieved to support the understanding of the specification and tacit knowledge cannot easily be spread. Projects thus risk misunderstanding requirements and are likely to deliver inadequate solutions. This paper presents an approach that uses downstream engineering artifacts, design decisions, to improve upstream information, a project's requirements. During its preliminary validation, the approach yielded promising results. It is well suited for distributed software projects, where the negotiation on requirements and solution design need to be made explicit and potential problems and misunderstandings caught at early stages. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.