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

Lead-time is crucial for decision–making in market-driven requirements engineering. Lead-time efficiency allows software companies to focus their resources on the most profitable functionality, and enables to remain competitive on the fast-changing software market. Achieving and sustaining low decision leadtime and the resulting high decision efficiency, requires 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 among 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 quickly accepted. The result provides input into the discussion if a large company should only focus on few yet large customers and disregard a significantly large group of small customers. Our results provide valuable insights for both 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. Copyright c © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.