While the importance of social interactions and especially communication is generally acknowledged in information systems development and requirements development, there are few studies that investigate communication.Departing from the conceptualisation of information systems development as a language development and formalisation process, we focus on linguistic communication and the development of language-based shared understanding of requirements. We investigate and analyse the semantic alignment process by which stakeholders achieve shared understanding in requirements development. We adopt Functional Pragmatics and examine how linguistic communication is shaped and regulated during requirements development in an actual project. By developing a pattern for semantic alignment and its use as an analytical lens, we enable a systematic and insightful understanding of communication in information systems development.
Knowledge transfer, communication, and shared understanding between project stakeholders are important factors in requirements deveiopment and in the information systems development process. Nevertheless, the impact and analysis of language and linguistic communication during requirements development is still an open issue. In our research, we claim that requirements development depends on the ability to deal with language and communication issues in practice and reach shared understanding of requirements. We propose the concept of language quality as a suitable means for analyzing the emergence of coherent and meaningful requirements. By applying the thereby developed dimensions of language quality to a real information systems development project, we are able to obtain practice-grounded propositions to further evaluate the consequences of different actions on the interaction and communication process of stakeholders in requirements development.
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