Marjo Kauppinen

Requirements Prioritization Challenges in Practice

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important activity in product development. In this paper, we describe the current state of requirements prioritization practices in two case companies and present the practical challenges involved. Our study showed that requirements prioritization is an ambiguous concept and current practices in the companies are informal. Requirements prioritization requires complex context-specific decision-making and must be performed iteratively in many phases during development work. Practitioners are seeking more systematic ways to prioritize requirements but they find it difficult to pay attention to all the relevant factors that have an effect on priorities and explicitly to draw different stakeholder views together. In addition, practitioners need more information about real customer preferences.

The role of user involvement in requirements quality and project success

User involvement is the key concept in the development of useful and usable systems and has positive effects on system success and user satisfaction. This paper reports the results of interviews and a survey conducted to investigate the role of user involvement in defining user requirements in development projects. The survey involved 18 software practitioners working in software related development projects in 13 companies in Finland. In addition, eight software practitioners working in three companies were interviewed. By combining qualitative and statistical analysis, we examine how users are involved in development projects and how user involvement influences projects. The analysis shows that, although it is rare in development projects, early user involvement is related to better requirements quality. The analysis also shows that involving users and customers as the source of information is related to project success.

Implementing requirements engineering processes throughout organizations: success factors and challenges

This paper aims at identifying critical factors affecting organization-wide implementation of requirements engineering (RE) processes. The paper is based on a broad literature review and three longitudinal case studies that were carried out using an action research method. The results indicate that RE process implementation is a demanding undertaking, and its success greatly depends on such human factors as motivation, commitment and enthusiasm. Therefore, it is essential that the RE process is useful for its individual users. Furthermore, the results indicate that organizations can gain benefits from RE by defining a simple RE process, by focusing on a small set of RE practices, and by supporting the systematic usage of these practices. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Linking Requirements and Testing in Practice

An increasing number of organizations are interested in binding requirements and testing more closely together. Based on a series of practitioner interviews conducted in five Finnish organizations, this paper presents a set of good practices that can be applied to create a stronger link between requirements engineering and testing. These practices include early tester participation particularly in requirements reviews, setting up traceability policies, taking feature requests from testers into account, and linking testing personnel with requirement owners. Due to reported hardships in implementing complete test traceability to requirements, communication links between testers and requirement owners are suggested in order to overcome the deficiencies of document links.

Empirical Evaluation of Two Requirements Prioritization Methods in Product Development Projects

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important but difficult activity in product development. The literature offers methods for requirements prioritization, but many authors report that practices in companies are mostly informal. In this study, we evaluated two requirements prioritization methods from the requirements engineering literature in industrial product development projects. In the first case, the users of the system evaluated the pair-wise comparison technique [5] for prioritizing user needs. In the second case, practitioners evaluated Wiegers’ method [18] for change requests. The findings from the cases provide information about the suitability of the prioritization methods for product development work. In addition, our findings indicate why it might be challenging for practitioners to employ a requirements prioritization method.

Linking the business view to requirements engineering: long-term product planning by roadmapping

Companies moving into the software product business and growing in size face new challenges that cannot be tackled completely with old practices. For example, the future development steps of the off-the-shelf products cannot be negotiated with just one or a few customers any more. This means that practitioners should be able to take aspects such as their companys own strategy and available market information more effectively into account in such decision-making. However, usually the company or business unit strategy is so high level that the gap to single requirements documents is far too long. Roadmapping is one technique that companies have used for long-term product planning in order to link the business view to requirements engineering (RE), and to make more business oriented product development decisions. In addition, roadmapping has been used to share a common understanding about the future development steps of products with different stakeholders. However, the application of the technique is not always easy. This paper gives an overview of roadmapping as a technique, and describes lessons learned from one Finnish software product company that has developed and evaluated its own roadmapping processes in their organization.

Software Ecosystems: A Set of Management Practices for Platform Integrators in the Telecom Industry

There is an emerging trend for software companies to adopt ecosystem strategies. A software ecosystem consists of an open technology platform with complementary components produced by several software companies or communities. By open innovation, ecosystems add value to the platform integrator’s core offerings, while causing management challenges. This paper investigates what management practices support platform integrators operating in software ecosystems. The set of management practices that is synthesised from the literature includes technology scouting, orchestration, software supply network management, and technology asset management. This paper gives a structured overview of the management practices and links them to the technology and innovation management processes. A case example shows how a platform integrator utilises these practices in the telecom industry.

Requirements Engineering as a Driver for Innovations

Under todays fiercely competitive conditions, companies are seeking new means to develop innovative products that satisfy customer and user needs. In order to understand how requirements engineering (RE) can support innovations, we observed RE activities in six Finnish companies. Our observations indicate that RE can play a vital role in the development of innovative products. We identified three main opportunities for innovations: 1) discovering hidden customer and user needs, 2) inventing new product features that satisfy these needs, and 3) supporting feature development with an innovative technical solution. Based on our observations, as well as on existing innovation and business-management literature, we have concluded that RE research can gain significant results by investigating how to discover and model hidden customer and user needs. We believe that this would allow RE to much better support those innovation practices that provide real competitive advantage.

Linking business and requirements engineering: is solution planning a missing activity in software product companies?

A strong link between strategy and product development is important, since companies need to select requirements for forthcoming releases. However, in practice, connecting requirements engineering (RE) and business planning is far from trivial. This paper describes the lessons learned from four software product companies that have recognized the need for more business-oriented long-term planning. The study was conducted using the action research approach. We identified five practices that seem to strengthen the link between business decisions and RE. These are (1) explicating the planning levels and time horizons; (2) separating the planning of products’ business goals from R&D resource allocation; (3) planning open-endedly with a pre-defined rhythm; (4) emphasizing whole-product thinking; and (5) making solution planning visible. To support whole-product thinking and solution planning, we suggest that companies create solution concepts. The purpose of the solution concept is to provide a big picture of the solution and guide RE activities.

Applying a Systematic Approach to Link Requirements and Testing: A Case Study

Requirements engineering and testing offer two complementary views of system development, and can, therefore, benefit from each other. This paper describes the lessons Metso learned from jointly improving requirements and testing processes. The goal of the process improvement was to increase the quality of R&D work. The new requirements and testing processes were piloted in an R&D project. The usage of the new processes removed the risk of doing double work, improved the visibility of the project status and the effectiveness of the project. The experiences of the pilot project suggest that the good results were mainly due to linking requirements and testing concurrently at process, people, and practice levels. It was essential that the new requirements and testing processes were integrated throughout the entire R&D project. In order to integrate the requirements and testing activities, critical roles and responsibilities were defined. Furthermore, we identified a set of good practices that helped perform the new processes.