HCC: Small: Collaborative Research: Cognitive Approaches to Distributed Software Requirements Engineering

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This research seeks to uncover explanations and principles about how requirements for information systems evolve and how they are managed across project contexts. It will enumerate project design workflows and practices to determine how different forms of artifact and process distribution affect requirements engineering goals and project success. Currently there are no rigorous, theory-based approaches to understanding and explaining large-scale distribution of requirements, though there is evidence of its success. Requirements engineering approaches address spatial and social distribution, and to a lesser extent, structural and temporal distribution. Most importantly, the combination of these issues, in total, has not been considered. Consequently, we cannot say which configuration of practices is best suited to achieve specified development goals, such as reduced time to market, or increased software quality and customer satisfaction. New theoretical models and empirical research are needed to understand the effects of distribution on evolving requirements. The project will (1) conduct field studies and ethnography, (2) analyze work procedures via grounded theory and comparative methods, (3) construct tools for data analysis, model building, and model analysis, and (4) analyze models via simulations and goal analyses. It will apply a distributed requirements framework consisting of four forms of distribution (social, spatial, structural, and temporal) and four requirements tasks (discovery, specification, negotiation, monitoring) in conjunction with the theory of distributed cognition to analyze requirements knowledge evolution in software projects. Additionally, it will design new tools that help acquire, model, and analyze distributed requirements workflows. The research aims to develop critical insights on emerging realities in large-scale design projects, which represent one of the drivers for economic growth and new forms of industrial organization. Yet, many software organizations are constrained by methodological and tool factors that do not recognize the increased challenges for requirements engineering. This research highlights the ways in which designers learn to manage the diversity of inputs and constraints, and seeks to understand processes that enhance software-based open innovation in the future.