Exploring the Relationship between Project Selection and Requirements Analysis (slides - PDF)

Presenter: Mark Bergman, Graduate Student, UCI/ISR

Abstract: The relationship between project selection and requirements analysis is important, yet has not received much attention. The decisions made during project selection directly affect and frame a project's requirements analysis. In current practice, it is expected that requirements analysis begins after project selection has occurred. Yet, we know little empirically about the procedural relationship between project selection and requirements analysis. We performed a field study to examine in detail how project selection is performed and what procedural relationship, if any, exists between project selection and requirements analysis. We found, contrary to the common view of requirements engineering practice, that requirements analysis occurred in multiple parallel streams. We observed that requirements analysis helped define the initial project choices. In addition, as the project selection process progressed, each candidate project's requirements were further refined. We call this process multiple parallel competitive requirements analysis (MPCRA). We argue that MPCRA should be considered as a viable alternative to current requirements engineering practices, especially for determining and designing large-scale complex projects.

Bio: Mark Bergman is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Information and Computer Science (ICS) at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). His research interests are in the area of socio-technical system design lifecycle with emphasis on organizational strategy-technical design co-formulation. The parts of the lifecycle he focuses on are early project determination and design, requirements analysis, system verification and validation, and system infusion. He has a B.S. from the University of California, Berkeley in EECS (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science), awarded on 3/83, and a M.S. from the University of California, Irvine in Information and Computer Science, awarded on 6/97. He has worked for over 10 years in Silicon Valley (Cupertino and Mountain View, CA) companies in between getting his B.S. and M.S. He has worked at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Tandem Computers in a variety of roles, including: software engineer, quality assurance engineer, first line project manager and consultant. He is a member in good standing of the following professional organizations: ACM, AOM, ASQ, IEEE, INCOSE, INFORMS, SMS, Toastmasters International and ANA.