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Soft systems methodology (SSM) should offer substantial benefits in managing expectations and requirements for a software-intensive system, but the benefits have not yet been examined empirically. This study reports an exploratory case study investigating the hypothesis that 'soft systems approach would identify all the flaws in requirements practices and suggest improvements suited to an organisation's context'. The authors analysed problematic requirements practices in an ongoing software-intensive socio-technical project, modelled potential changes and asked the project team to assess the organisational fit of these changes. The authors further monitored the requirements engineering improvements that the project team made according to the case study. The authors conclude that SSM could indeed uncover a relatively complete set of flaws in requirements practices. Although not all suggested changes were regarded as necessary, the implemented changes had contributed positively to the organisation's requirements engineering improvements.

In practice, many factors must be considered and balanced when making software reuse decisions. However, few empirical studies exist that leverage practical techniques to support decision-making in software reuse. This paper reports a case study that applied SMART (Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique) to a company that considered reuse as an option of reengineering its web site. The company's reuse goal was set to maximize benefits and to minimize costs. After several rounds of rigorous analysis, the company identified the optimal reuse percentage, which was reusing 76-100% of the existing artifacts and knowledge. Our study shows that SMART is a valuable and practical technique that can be incorporated in an organization's software reuse program.

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