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Authors: Alexander Egyed and Barry
Boehm
Roughly 35 three-person teams played the
roles of user, customer, and developer in negotiating the
requirements of a library information system. Each team was provided
with a suggested set of stakeholder goals and implementation
options, but were encouraged to exercise creativity in expanding the
stakeholder goals and in creating options for negotiating an
eventually satisfactory set of requirements.
The teams consisted of students in a
first-year graduate course in software engineering at USC. They were
provided with training in the Theory W (win-win) approach to
requirements determination and the associated USC WinWin groupware
support system. They were required to complete the assignment in two
weeks.
Data was collected on the negotiation
process and results, with 23 projects providing sufficiently
complete and comparable data for analysis. A number of hypotheses
were formulated about the results, e.g. that the uniform set of
initial conditions would lead to uniform results. This paper
summarizes the data analysis, which shows that expectations of
uniform group behavior were generally not realized. |