Analysis of System Requirements Negotiation Behavior Patterns

Roughly 35 three-person teams played the roles of user, customer, and developer in negotiating the requirements of a library information system. Each team was provided with a suggested set of stakeholder goals and implementation options, but were encouraged to exercise creativity in expanding the stakeholder goals and in creating options for negotiating an eventually satisfactory set of system requirements. The teams consisted of students in a first-year graduate course in software engineering at USC. They were provided with training in the Theory W (win-win) (Boehm-Ross, 1989) approach to system requirements determination and the associated USC WinWin groupware support system (Boehm, et al, 1995)(Horowitz, 1996). They were required to complete the assignment in two weeks. Data was collected on the negotiation process and results, with 23 projects providing sufficiently complete and comparable data for analysis. A number of hypotheses were formulated about the results. Some of the hypotheses addressed the use and potential improvement of WinWin features. Others addressed more general process issues, e.g. that the uniform set of initial conditions would lead to uniform results. This paper summarizes the data analysis, which shows that expectations of uniform group behavior were generally not realized. In terms of goals for relevant Capability Maturity Models (CMM’s), this implies that the System Engineering CMM’s Level 2 goal of Planned and Tracked processes is more realistic than the Software CMM’s Level 2 goal of Repeatable processes.