Aplicação da etnografia no contexto de fábrica de software na perspectiva da engenharia de requisitos

Abstract

Looking at the context of difficulties in drafting requirements documentation and in the activity of transferring and sharing knowledge among requirements engineers, an organizational ethnography was developed to closely understand how a software factory deals with this issue. The overall objective of this paper was to investigate challenges in two teams of requirements engineers that impact on the production and maintenance of effective documentation for their different target audiences (developers, test analysts, the requirements engineers themselves, and customers). The challenges identified were grouped into three broad categories: knowledge sharing, customer consultation, documentation, and agile methodologies. To accomplish this work, an adaptation of an organizational ethnographic process was developed, composed of the steps of: team observation, interviews (with requirements engineers, team leaders and systems management) and systems archeology. At the end of this process, the collected results are interpreted in the last stage of the ethnographic process called triangulation. Then, be applied Grounded Theory methodology adapted to categorize the challenges, and indicate the practices that will allow, according to the literature, the software factory to obtain: productivity gains, reduction of communication cost between team members, reduction of the planning cost. sprints, reduced requirements engineer face-to-face, and effective documentation. The identified challenges, the benefit in using the suggested practices and the ethnographic process itself - constituted specifically for this research - are the contributions of this work.