Requirements Computation: Analyzing Requirements Cognition in Multiple Development Paradigms

The identification and management of users’ requirements have been a persistent challenge confronting software development projects for decades. Complicating this challenge, research on requirements engineering processes has failed to keep pace with significant changes in the lived practice of software development. In this paper, we consider requirements-oriented processes as a socio-technical computational task in which diverse individuals and artifacts collaboratively “compute” the requirements for an envisioned software resource. Through the perspective of distributed cognition, we analyze the distributed requirements activities of three information systems development projects, each representing a distinct development methodology – structured development, agile development, and open source software development. We construct models of the computational structures of these projects to support a novel analytical basis for comparison and contrast of requirements-oriented efforts in these development methodologies.