Abstract
It is well documented that customers and software development teams need to share and refine understanding of the requirements throughout the software development lifecycle. The development of this shared understanding is complex and error-prone however. Techniques and tools to support the development of a shared understanding of requirements (SUR) should be based on a clear conceptualization of the phenomenon, with a basis on relevant theory and analysis of observed practice. This study contributes to this with a detailed conceptualization of SUR development as sequence of group-level state transitions based on specializing the Team Mental Model construct. Furthermore it proposes a novel group-level cognitive model as the main result of an analysis of data collected from the observation of an Agile software development team over a period of several months. The initial high-level application of the model shows it has promise for providing new insights into supporting SUR development.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Kamata, M.I., Tamai, T.: How Does Requirements Quality Relate to Project Success or Failure? Presented at the 15th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE 2007 (2007)
Sutcliffe, A.: User-Centred Requirements Engineering. Springer, London (2002)
Bubenko, J.A.: Challenges in requirements engineering. In: Proceedings of the Second IEEE International Symposium on Presented at the Requirements Engineering (1995)
Sadraei, E., Aurum, A., Beydoun, G., Paech, B.: A field study of the requirements engineering practice in Australian software industry. Requirements Eng. (2007)
Buchan, J., Ekadharmawan, C.H., MacDonell, S.G.: Insights into Domain Knowledge Sharing in Software Development Practice in SMEs. Presented at the APSEC 2009: Proceedings of the 2009 16th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (December 2009)
Hansen, S., Berente, N., Lyytinen, K.: Requirements in the 21st Century: Current Practice and Emerging Trends, 1–44 (2008)
Cannon-Bowers, J.A., Salas, E.: Reflection on shared cognition. Journal of Organizational Behavior 22, 195–202 (2007)
Mohammed, S., Ferzandi, L., Hamilton, K.: Metaphor No More: A 15-Year Review of the Team Mental Model Construct. Journal of Management 36, 876–910 (2010)
Rouse, W.B., Cannon-Bowers, J.A., Salas, E.: The role of mental models in team performance in complex systems. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 22, 1296–1308 (1992)
Klimoski, R., Mohammed, S.: Team Mental Model: Construct or Metaphor? Journal of Management 20, 403–437 (1994)
Cannon-Bowers, J.A., Salas, E., Converse, S.A.: Shared mental models in expert team decision making. In: Castellan, J. (ed.) Current Issues in Individual and Group Decision Making (1993)
Edwards, B.D., Day, E.A., Arthur, W.J., Bell, S.T.: Relationships Among Team Ability Composition, Team Mental Models, and Team Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology 91, 727–736 (2006)
Stahl, G.: Group cognition. The MIT Press, Cambridge (2006)
Hutchins, E.: Cognition in the Wild. MIT Press, Cambridge (1995)
Heylighen, F., Heath, M., Van, F.: The Emergence of Distributed Cognition: A conceptual framework. Presented at the Collective Intentionality IV (2004)
Elo, S., Kyngäs, H.: The qualitative content analysis process. Journal of Advanced Nursing 62, 107–115 (2008)
Jordan, B., Henderson, A.: Interaction analysis: Foundations and practice. The Journal of the Learning Sciences 4, 39–103 (1995)
Stahl, G.: How to Study Group Cognition. In: Puntambekar, S., Erkens, G., Hmelo-Silver, C. (eds.) Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Series, pp. 107–130. Springer (2011)
Runeson, P., Höst, M.: Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical Software Engineering 14, 131–164 (2008)
Yin, R.K.: Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks (2003)
Cañas, A.J., Carff, R., Hill, G., Carvalho, M., Arguedas, M., Eskridge, T.C., et al.: Concept Maps: Integrating Knowledge and Information Visualization. Knowledge and Information Visualization, 205-219 (2005)
Cañas, A.J., Hill, G., Carff, R., Suri, N., Lott, J., Gómez, G., et al.: Cmaptools: A Knowledge Modeling and Sharing Environment. Paper presented at the First International. Conference on Concept Mapping Pamplona, Spain (2004)
Sharp, H., Robinson, H.: A Distributed Cognition Account of Mature XP Teams. In: Abrahamsson, P., Marchesi, M., Succi, G. (eds.) XP 2006. LNCS, vol. 4044, pp. 1–10. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Blandford, A., Furniss, D.: DiCoT: A Methodology for Applying Distributed Cognition to the Design of Teamworking Systems. In: Gilroy, S.W., Harrison, M.D. (eds.) DSV-IS 2005. LNCS, vol. 3941, pp. 26–38. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Buchan, J. (2014). An Empirical Cognitive Model of the Development of Shared Understanding of Requirements. In: Zowghi, D., Jin, Z. (eds) Requirements Engineering. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 432. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43610-3_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43610-3_13
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-43609-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-43610-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)