Johan Natt och Dag

An industrial case study on distributed prioritisation in market-driven requirements engineering for packaged software

When developing packaged software, which is sold ‘off-the-shelf’ on a worldwide marketplace, it is essential to collect needs and opportunities from different market segments and use this information in the prioritisation of requirements for the next software release. This paper presents an industrial case study where a distributed prioritisation process is proposed, observed and evaluated. The stakeholders in the requirements prioritisation process include marketing offices distributed around the world. A major objective of the distributed prioritisation is to gather and highlight the differences and similarities in the requirement priorities of the different market segments. The evaluation through questionnaires shows that the stakeholders found the process useful. The paper also presents novel approaches to visualise the priority distribution among stakeholders, together with measures on disagreement and satisfaction. Product management found the proposed charts valuable as decision support when selecting requirements for the next release, as they revealed unforeseen differences among stakeholder priorities. Conclusions on stakeholder tactics are provided and issues of further research are identified, including ways of addressing identified challenges.

Requirements engineering challenges in market-driven software development - An interview study with practitioners

Requirements engineering for market-driven software development entails special challenges. This paper presents results from an empirical study that investigates these challenges, taking a qualitative approach using interviews with fourteen employees at eight software companies and a focus group meeting with practitioners. The objective of the study is to increase the understanding of the area of market-driven requirements engineering and provide suggestions for future research by describing encountered challenges. A number of challenging issues were found, including bridging communication gaps between marketing and development, selecting the right level of process support, basing the release plan on uncertain estimates, and managing the constant flow of requirements.

A Feasibility Study of Automated Natural Language Requirements Analysis in Market-Driven Development

In market-driven software development there is a strong need for support to handle congestion in the requirements engineering process, which may occur as the demand for short time-to-market is combined with a rapid arrival of new requirements from many different sources. Automated analysis of the continuous flow of incoming requirements provides an opportunity to increase the efficiency of the requirements engineering process. This paper presents empirical evaluations of the benefit of automated similarity analysis of textual requirements, where existing information retrieval techniques are used to statistically measure requirements similarity. The results show that automated analysis of similarity among textual requirements is a promising technique that may provide effective support in identifying relationships between requirements.

Exploring Bottlenecks in Market-Driven Requirements Management Processes with Discrete Event Simulation

This paper presents a study where a market-driven requirements management process is simulated. In market-driven software development, generic software packages are released to a market with many customers. New requirements are continuously issued, and the objective of the requirements management process is to elicit, manage, and prioritize the requirements. In the presented study, a specific requirements management process is modelled using discrete event simulation, and the parameters of the model are estimated based on interviews with people from the specific organisation where the process is used. Based on the results from simulations, conditions that result in an overload situation are identified. Simulations are also used to find process change proposals that can result in a non-overloaded process. The risk of overload can be avoided if the capacity of the requirements management process is increased, or if the number of incoming requirements is decreased, for example, through early rejection of low-priority requirements.

An experiment on linguistic tool support for consolidation of requirements from multiple sources in market-driven product development

This paper presents an experiment with a linguistic support tool for consolidation of requirements sets. The experiment is designed based on the requirements management process at a large market-driven software development company that develops generic solutions to satisfy many different customers. New requirements and requests for information are continuously issued, which must be analyzed and responded to. The new requirements should first be consolidated with the old to avoid reanalysis of previously elicited requirements and to complement existing requirements with new information. In the presented experiment, a new open-source tool is evaluated in a laboratory setting. The tool uses linguistic engineering techniques to calculate similarities between requirements and presents a ranked list of suggested similar requirements, between which links may be assigned. It is hypothesized that the proposed technique for finding and linking similar requirements makes the consolidation more efficient. The results show that subjects that are given the support provided by the tool are significantly more efficient and more correct in consolidating two requirements sets, than are subjects that do not get the support. The results suggest that the proposed techniques may give valuable support and save time in an industrial requirements consolidation process.

Managing Large Repositories of Natural Language Requirements

An increasing number of market and technology driven software development companies face the challenge of managing an enormous amount of requirements written in natural language. As requirements arrive at high pace, the requirements repository easily deteriorates, impeding customer feedback and well-founded decisions for future product releases. In this chapter we introduce a linguistic engineering approach in support of large-scale requirements management. We present three case studies, encompassing different requirements management processes, where our approach has been evaluated. We also discuss the role of natural language requirements and present a survey of research aimed at giving support in the engineering and management of natural language requirements.