Requirements-driven collaboration

本项目研究跨职能团队之间的协作，这些团队在整个项目生命周期中参与需求定义、协商、实施和管理活动。这种协作，我们称之为需求驱动的协作，涉及不同项目成员(客户、业务分析师、架构师、开发人员、测试人员)的沟通和协调活动。研究表明，这些团队成员之间的有效持续协调对于成功实现需求以及项目成功至关重要。它还表明，这些团队成员工作活动的多学科性质以及(全球团队中的)专业、组织和文化背景对它构成了挑战。 我们的主要研究目标包括(1)开发需求驱动的协作中的沟通、协调和知识管理模型，(2)开发技术来研究这些跨职能团队中工作的技术和社会维度之间的一致性，以及(3)设计和评估实现这些模型和技术并支持跨职能团队有效协调的工具。为了进行和评估我们的研究，我们将进行实地研究，利用我们与IBM和戴尔已经建立的行业合作。我们的数据分析方法包括需求驱动的跨职能团队在社交网络上的社交网络分析方法，以及其他方法，如交流的内容和对话分析，以获得关于协作的定性数据。 本研究的创新之处在于，角色的概念是跨职能团队研究与传统开发团队研究的不同之处。这项研究将带来重要的经验证据和经验开发的模型和技术，以补充我们所拥有的关于大型分布式团队如何跨职能沟通和协调工作以实现需求的稀缺知识。

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.