Requirements-driven collaboration: Leveraging the invisible relationships between requirements and people

Abstract

In this chapter we introduce requirements-driven collaboration, which is the collaboration of a cross-functional team of business analysts, designers, developers and testers during the development and management of requirements. We describe an approach that (1) constructs a requirement-centric social network which represents the membership and relationships among members working on a requirement and its associated downstream artifacts and (2) outlines a number of social network analysis techniques to study collaboration aspects such as communication, awarenessawareness, and the alignment of technical dependencies driven by development of requirements and social interactions. To demonstrate our approach, we discuss a case study that examines requirements-driven collaboration within an industrial, globally-distributed software team. Finally, we discuss implications regarding the use of our requirements-driven collaboration approach for research and practice. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.