Is There a Silver Bullet for Adding Value to Requirements Selection?

Aybüke AurumSchool of Information Systems, Technology and Management

University of New South Wales

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Value Based Requirements Engineering

• Value-based Requirements Engineering (VBRE) aims to maximise the value of software releases for all stakeholders through the selection and prioritisation of requirements.

• The creation of product value through requirements selection and prioritisation is a new area of study, however little is known about industry perceptions of creating product value through Requirements Engineering (RE) and release planning.

• This talk is concerned with the decision making process in the selection of requirements for software products.

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Aligning RE Decisions

Business Decisions

Project DecisionsProduct Decisions

Ideally, this is where we would like to be in software development

Business decision Product DecisionsProduct decisions Project Decisions

Software applications need to be well aligned with business strategies of organizations

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RE Decisions Framework

RE decisions Strategic DecisionsTactical Decisions

Operational Decisions

Business level decisions

Pre-project RE

* business strategy* competitiveness* technology* marketing* economic value of the product

* pricing* planned benefits of the product

* tradeoff between technology push and market-pull

Product level decisions

* software product road mapping* packaging requirements for a specific release* software product architectures

* engineering decisions* personnel management

* change management * requirements volatility, e.g. whether a particular requirement is subject to a syntactic or semantic change

Project level decisions

In-project RE

* project planning * feasibility study* recruiting people

* project management* quality control

* validation in terms of which requirements will go to the next release

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Impact of the Requirements Selection Process

• Business– Making good decisions leads to making good

business?• People

– Satisfaction with the decision, the outcome of the decision and the decision making process.

• Project– Cost effectiveness -- within budget and on time

• Product– An important decision in software product

development has two distinct components:• Technical judgments• Value judgments

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Research Questions How is value-based requirements engineering perceived by

the software development industry? How does the software industry conduct release planning

in order to create product value? What values are applied to the decision making process to

select and prioritise requirements for a software project or release? How does this differ to industry perceptions of the optimal

application of the criteria? To what degree to the do the perspectives of the major

stakeholders influence the requirements selection and prioritisation process? How does this differ to industry perceptions of the optimal

application of the criteria?

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Shortages in the Decision Making Process• Adding value to a decision is not well defined! Many

decisions are ad hoc – The decision-making process is not well identified – in many cases it is

unstructured and open-ended. There are no specific decision making criteria.

• Lack of communication between business, product and project level stakeholders– Uninformed stakeholders– Decision Hijackers

• Lack of understanding of the business strategy • Decision leaders and decision executors are not necessarily the

same people• Time pressure• Geographically dispersed stakeholders

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References• Biffl S, Aurum A, Boehm B, Erdogan H, Grunbacher P (Eds) (2005).

Value-Based Software Engineering. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany ISBN 2-540-25993-7

• Aurum A, Wohlin C (Eds) (2005). Engineering and Managing Software Requirements. Springer, Heidelberg, ISBN 3-540-25043-3

• Wohlin C, Aurum A (2005). Bundling Software Requirements to Create Product Value. In Value-based Software Engineering by Biffl S, Aurum A, Boehm B, Erdogmus H, Grünbacher P (Eds) Springer, Heidelberg, Germany

• Wohlin C, Aurum A (2005). What is Important when Deciding to Include a Software Requirement in a Project or a Release? 4th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, Noosa Heads, Australia, 17-18 Nov 2005

• Aurum A, Wohlin C (2005). Aligning Requirements with Business Objectives: A Framework for Requirements Engineering Decisions. Workshop on Requirements Engineering Decision Support, Paris, France 29 Aug-2nd Sept, 2005

• Barney, S, Aurum A, Wohlin C (2005). Quest for a Silver Bullet: Creating Software Product Value through Requirements Selection. Submitted to Australian Software Engineering Conference, ASWEC’06, Sydney, Australia, 18-21 April, 2006

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Discussion

• Is there a Silver Bullet for adding value to requirements selection?

• What are the main challenges in empirical research when investigating the value-based approach?

• How do we include the 3 perspectives -- business, project, product -- in our empirical research?– How do we combine studies across the different levels?

• What do value-based requirements help increase cost effectiveness in the subsequent processes?