The role of distances in requirements communication: a case study

Abstract

Requirements communication plays a vital role in development projects in coordinating the customers, the business roles and the software engineers. Communication gaps represent a significant source of project failures and overruns. For example, misunderstood or uncommunicated requirements can lead to software that does not meet the customers' requirements, and subsequent low number of sales or additional cost required to redo the implementation. We propose that requirements engineering (RE) distance measures are useful for locating gaps in requirements communication and for improving on development practice. In this paper, we present a case study of one software development project to evaluate this proposition. Thirteen RE distances were measured including geographical and cognitive distances between project members, and semantic distances between requirements and testing artefacts. The findings confirm that RE distances impact requirements communication and project coordination. Furthermore, the concept of distances was found to enable constructive group reflection on communication gaps and improvements to development practices. The insights reported in this paper can provide practitioners with an increased awareness of distances and their impact. Furthermore, the results provide a stepping stone for further research into RE distances and methods for improving on software development processes and practices.

Keeping Evolving Requirements and Acceptance Tests Aligned with Automatically Generated Guidance

“…Sinha et al [17] define and explain the communication problems when managing requirements in a distributed environment. Bjarnason and Sharp [18] and Adzic [19] emphasize the communication problems between requirements engineers, developers and testers in agile projects. By generating guidance in natural language that can be easily communicated to the interested parties via e-mail, our approach supports easy and timely communication of changes between requirements engineers and developers/testers.…”

Aligning Requirements and Acceptance Tests via Automatically Generated Guidance

“…Sinha et al [15] defined and explained the communication problems when managing requirements in distributed environment. Bjarnason and Sharp [4] and Adzic [1] clearly emphasize the communication problems between requirements engineers, test engineers (managers), developers and testers in agile projects and propose guidance on how to bridge this communication gap. With an automated generation of guidance in natural language that can be sent on one click to the interested parties, our approach supports easier and "on-time" communication between requirements and test engineers.…”

Requirements elicitation and refinement in collaborative research projects

“…Global requirements engineering (GRE) is the field of software engineering research that focuses on problems and solutions for the elicitation, negotiation, documentation, and management of requirements in globally distributed software projects . Within this field, the literature counts a relevant amount of works describing challenges and experiences, and several issues were observed to affect the requirements engineering (RE) activities in global projects. In particular, communication difficulties, knowledge management, physical distance, and cultural diversity have been regarded as major obstacles for the acquisition of a shared understanding of the problem domain, impacting also on the decision‐making process.…”

“…Within this field, the literature counts a relevant amount of works describing challenges and experiences, and several issues were observed to affect the requirements engineering (RE) activities in global projects. In particular, communication difficulties, knowledge management, physical distance, and cultural diversity have been regarded as major obstacles for the acquisition of a shared understanding of the problem domain, impacting also on the decision‐making process. The challenges outlined in these works brought to the definition of techniques for collaborative requirements elicitation and distributed RE .…”