Decisions not requirements: decision-centered engineering of computer-based systems

Evans, Rhianne; Park, Sooyong; Alberts, Henry C.

doi:10.1109/ecbs.1997.581926

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Decision making is an important aspect of RE and significantly impacts requirements management. As stated by DeGregorio , requirements management is not possible without decision management.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring factors affecting decision outcome and lead time in large‐scale requirements engineering

Wnuk

Kabbedijk

Brinkkemper

et al. 2015

J Software Evolu Process

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Lead time, defined as the duration between the moment a request was filed and the moment the decision was made, is an important aspect of decision making in market-driven requirements engineering. Minimizing lead time allows software companies to focus their resources on the most profitable functionality and enables them to remain competitive within the quickly changing software market. Achieving and sustaining low decision lead time and the resulting high decision efficiency require a better understanding of factors that may affect both decision lead time and outcome. In order to identify possible factors, we conducted an exploratory two-stage case study that combines the statistical analysis of seven possible relationships among decision characteristics at a large company with a survey of industry participants. Our results show that the number of products affected by a decision increases the time needed to make a decision. Practitioners should take this aspect into consideration when planning for efficient decision making and possibly reducing the complexity of decisions. Our results also show that when a change request originates from an important customer, the request is more often accepted. The results provide input into the discussion of whether a large company should focus on only a few of its large customers and disregard its significantly larger group of small customers. The results provide valuable insights for researchers, who can use them to plan research of decision-making processes and methods, and for practitioners, who can use them to optimize their decision-making processes. In future work, we plan to investigate other decision characteristics, such as the number of stakeholders involved in the discussion about the potential change or the number of dependencies between software components.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring factors affecting decision outcome and lead time in large‐scale requirements engineering

Wnuk

Kabbedijk

Brinkkemper

et al. 2015

J Software Evolu Process

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These decisions are generally continuous and in numerous cases uncertainties in the final cost, schedule, functionality, and performance are inevitable [14]. So managing the transitions between informal to more formal representations is a key to the success of any engineering task.…”

Section: Degree Of Formalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Formalizing Informal Stakeholder Decisions--A Hybrid Method Approach

Kitapci

Boehm

2007

2007 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'07)

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Decisions are hard to make when available information is incomplete, inconsistent, and ambiguous. Moreover, good -sufficiently complete, consistent, traceable, and testable -requirements are a prerequisite for successful projects. Without understanding what the stakeholders really want and need and writing these requirements in a concise, understandable and testable manner, projects will not develop what the stakeholders wanted leading to either major late rework or project termination. During the development of the WinWin negotiation model and the EasyWinWin requirements negotiation method, we have gained considerable experience in capturing decisions made by stakeholders in over 100 projects. However, the transition from informal decisions to requirements specification is still a challenging problem.Based on our analysis of the projects to date, we have developed an integrated set of gap-bridging methods as a hybrid method to support stakeholders making better decisions in order to eliminate requirements related problems and ease the process of formality transition.

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“…[1,2,3,7,16,17]). In these articles the connection made is that requirements engineering is a decision rich activity, and can benefit from more structured decision processes.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perspectives on Requirements Understandability -- For Whom Does the Teacher's Bell Toll?

Svahnberg

Gorschek

Eriksson

et al. 2008

2008 Requirements Engineering Education and Training

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Software development decision makers use many different information sources as a basis for their decisions. One of these sources is the requirements specification, which is used in a large number of processes throughout the software development cycle. In order to make good decisions, the quality and completeness of the available information is important. Hence, requirements must be written in a way that is understandable for the different decision makers. However, requirements are rarely written with an explicit perception of how to make them understandable for different target usages. In this study we investigate the implicit assumptions of current and future requirements engineers and their teachers regarding which usages they perceive as most important when creating requirements. This is contrasted with industrial viewpoints of the relative importance of different requirements usages. The results indicate that the teachers and future requirements engineers have a strong focus towards in-project perspectives, and very little in common with the perspectives of industry managers. Thus, we are training students to serve as software developers, and not software engineering managers.

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Decisions not requirements: decision-centered engineering of computer-based systems

Cited by 12 publications

References 1 publication

Exploring factors affecting decision outcome and lead time in large‐scale requirements engineering

Exploring factors affecting decision outcome and lead time in large‐scale requirements engineering

Formalizing Informal Stakeholder Decisions--A Hybrid Method Approach

Perspectives on Requirements Understandability -- For Whom Does the Teacher's Bell Toll?

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