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Authors: Barry Boehm and Alexander
Egyed
Fifteen 6-member-teams were involved in
negotiating requirements for multimedia software systems for the
Library of the University of Southern California. The re-quirements
negotiation used the Stakeholder WinWin success model and the USC
WinWin negotiation model (Win Condition-Issue-Option-Agreement) and
groupware system. The negotiated results were integrated into a Life
Cycle Objectives (LCO) package for the project, including
descriptions of the system's requirements, operational concept,
architecture, life cycle plan, and feasibility rationale. These were
subsequently elaborated into a Life Cycle Architecture package
including a prototype; six of these were then implemented as
products.
A number of hypotheses were formulated,
tested, and evolved regarding the WinWin negotiation processes and
their effectiveness in supporting the development of effective LCO
packages, in satisfying Library clients, and in stimulating
cooperation among stakeholders. Other hypotheses involved
identification of WinWin improvements, relationships among
negotiation strategies on LCO package and project outcomes.
Some of the more illuminating results were:
- Most of the stakeholder Win Conditions
were non-controversial (were not involved in Issues). Also, most
Issues were decoupled from other Issues and were easy to
resolve. This implies that requirements nego-tiation support
systems should focus at least as much on handling simple
relationships well as on handling complex relationships well.
- Similar applications projects did not
follow similar processes, confirming our previous conclusion
[11] that repeatability of software front-end processes is not a
realistic goal.
- The strongest positive effects of using
the WinWin approach were increasing cooperativeness, focusing
participants on key issues, reducing friction, and fa-cilitating
distributed collaboration.
- The major improvements for the WinWin
approach (now being implemented) were increasing WinWin
training, reducing usage overhead, and concurrent negotiation
and prototyping.
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