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Authors: Alexander Egyed and Barry
Boehm
In a period of two years, two rather
independent experiments were conducted at the University of Southern
California. In 1995, 23 three-person teams negotiated the
requirements for a hypothetical library system. Then in 1996, 14
six-person teams negotiated the requirements for real multimedia
related library systems.
A number of hypotheses were created to test
how real software projects differ from hypothetical ones. Other
hypotheses address differences in uniformity and repeatability.
The results indicate that repeatability in
1996 was even harder to achieve then in 1995 (Egyed-Boehm, 1996).
Nevertheless, this paper presents some surprising commonalties
between both years that indicate some areas of uniformity.
In both years, the same overall development
process (spiral model) was followed, the same negotiation tools (WinWin
System) were used, and the same people were doing the analysis of
the findings. Thus, the comparison is less blurred by fundamental
differences like terminology, process, etc. |