In Situ Requirements Analysis: An examination of the Relationship between Requirements Determination and Project Selection

Poster

Post-Doctoral Researcher: Mark Bergman

Abstract: There has been sparse study of how requirements analysis is performed in situ, i.e. by organizations building large, complex systems. We assert that a better understanding of in situ requirements practice is necessary to improve and ground current theories of requirements analysis. We performed an empirical field study to examine in detail the issues faced by practitioners in forming and stabilizing requirements and the procedures they created to overcome them. We found that the process of requirements determination was intimately related to project selection. We further observed that these two processes were based on the interplay of 1) applied technical, project, and organizational authority with 2) design, sensemaking, and negotiation activity. The ethnography produced an idealized, grounded authority-activity model of requirements analysis and project selection. The model is a generalized form of requirements analysis-project selection for large, complex, risk adverse (highly sensitive to failure) projects. It represents a method to balance the differentiated authority of the stakeholder groups with the activities necessary to form and stabilize technology-project candidates and their related requirements. We argue that the core issues addressed in this field study are generalizable across organizations that build large, complex systems and hence, the results of this study form a basis for a general theory of requirements analysis practice.

Bio: Mark Bergman is a Post-doctoral researcher in the School of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. He received his Ph.D. form UCI in 2003. His research interests are in the area of system design lifecycle processes, socio-technical design, collaborative systems and organizational strategy formulation. 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. degrees. He has worked at Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Tandem Computers as a software engineer, a quality assurance engineer, a first line project manager and a consultant. He is a member in good standing of the following professional organizations: ACM, AOM, ASQ, IEEE, INCOSE, INFORMS, SMS, Toastmasters International and ANA.