Requirements-driven collaboration

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This project studies the collaboration of cross-functional teams that are involved in the activities of requirements definition, negotiation, implementation and management throughout a project lifetime. This collaboration, which we term requirements-driven collaboration, involves communication and coordination activities of diverse project members (customers, business analysts, architects, developers, testers). Research shows that effective ongoing coordination among these team members is critical to successful implementation of requirements and hence project success. It also shows that it is challenged by the multidisciplinary nature of these team members' work activities as well as professional, organizational and cultural (in global teams) backgrounds. Our main research objectives include (1) the development of models of communication, coordination, and knowledge management in requirements-driven collaboration, (2) the development of techniques to study the alignment between the technical and social dimensions of work in these cross-functional teams, and (3) the design and evaluation of tools that implement these models and techniques and support effective coordination of cross-functional teams. To conduct and evaluate our research, we will conduct field studies that leverage our already established industrial collaborations with IBM and Dell. Our data analysis includes methods of social network analysis on social networks of cross-functional teams in requirements-driven collaboration, other methods such as content and conversation analysis of communication for the qualitative data about collaboration. The innovative aspect of this research is the concept of role is what differentiates the study of cross-functional teams from the traditional studies of developer teams. This research will bring significant empirical evidence and empirically developed models and techniques to complement the scarce knowledge we have about how large distributed teams communicate and coordinate their work across functions to implement requirements.