An Industrial Case Study on Measuring the Quality of the Requirements Scoping Process
This addresses the challenge of improving requirements management processes for companies dealing with scope fluctuations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing practices without introducing a new paradigm.
The study tackled the problem of measuring requirements scoping quality in industry, finding that companies struggle with scope changes and lack effective metrics, and it presented a set of metrics based on interviews with 22 participants at a large embedded systems company.
Decision making and requirements scoping occupy central roles in helping to develop products that are demanded by the customers and ensuring company strategies are accurately realized in product scope. Many companies experience continuous and frequent scope changes and fluctuations but struggle to measure the phenomena and correlate the measurement to the quality of the requirements process. We present the results from an exploratory interview study among 22 participants working with requirements management processes at a large company that develops embedded systems for a global market. Our respondents shared their opinions about the current set of requirements management process metrics as well as what additional metrics they envisioned as useful. We present a set of metrics that describe the quality of the requirements scoping process. The findings provide practical insights that can be used as input when introducing new measurement programs for requirements management and decision making.