Requirements Engineering Optimization Using the Method Association Approach

Abstract

The b2b product software company Keylane|Quinity is experiencing increasing complexity in managing their Requirements Engineering (RE) process, in part due to a growing product and an expected growth in the client base. The main question for the company is how to balance their elicitation efforts in new implementation projects, so that they are both effective (all critical functional requirements are found) and efficient (not all known requirements are gathered again). In this project the Method Association Approach (MAA), part of the Method Engineering domain, has been applied to assemble a new RE method based on existing methods First we identified both the business needs for RE and attributes of good RE from scientific literature. These so called ‘features’ were then associated to the method fragments of candidate methods. The resulting patchwork method was evaluated in lunch sessions with multiple experts, and subsequently improved. The result was a theoretically complete. In addition to the standard MAA, additional efforts were made to integrate the method into the company and its way of working. This resulted in a method that is both theoretically complete and practically usable