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Patterns of continuous requirements clarification

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Abstract

In software projects involving large and often distributed teams, requirements evolve through the collaboration of many stakeholders, supported by online tools such as mailing lists, bug tracking systems, or online discussion forums. In this collaboration, requirements typically evolve from initial ideas, through clarification, to the implementation of a stable requirement. Deviations from this expected course might indicate requirements that are poorly understood, need further negotiation, or better alignment with project goals. If not addressed timely, such problems can surface late in the development cycle with negative consequences such as rework, missed schedules, or overrun budget. This paper presents an approach that provides project managers’ with timely awareness of such requirements-related risks, based on automatic analysis of stakeholders’ online requirement communication. We describe a clarification classifier that automatically analyzes requirements communication in a project and detects clarification events, a catalog of clarification patterns, and a pattern matcher that suggests communication patterns based on our pattern catalog. Our approach has been empirically constructed and evaluated in a case study in the \(\hbox {IBM}^{\circledR }\) Rational Team \(\hbox {Concert}^\circledR\) project. We discuss the applicability of our approach in other projects as well as avenues for extending our pattern catalog toward a theory of clarification patterns.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the RTC team members and managers who provided clarifications on our dataset when needed, and later participated in our interviews.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, 412 96, Göteborg, Sweden

    Eric Knauss

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Engineering/Computer Science Building (ECS), Room 504, STN CSC, P.O. Box 1700, Victoria, BC, V8W 2Y2, Canada

    Daniela Damian

  3. DePaul University Chicago, 243 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60604, USA

    Jane Cleland-Huang

  4. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, P.O. Box 80.089, 3508 TB, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Remko Helms

Authors
  1. Eric Knauss
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  2. Daniela Damian
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  3. Jane Cleland-Huang
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  4. Remko Helms
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Eric Knauss.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table 9.

Table 9 Classification scheme with examples from IBM case study
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Knauss, E., Damian, D., Cleland-Huang, J. et al. Patterns of continuous requirements clarification. Requirements Eng 20, 383–403 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-014-0205-z

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