What If People Learn Requirements Over Time? A Rough Introduction to Requirements Economics
This addresses the problem of evolving stakeholder expectations for software developers and engineers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing discussions without presenting a concrete solution.
The paper tackles the challenge of changing requirements in Requirements Engineering by proposing that learning over time explains these changes and introduces costs, leading to the new discipline of requirements economics.
The overall objective of Requirements Engineering is to specify, in a systematic way, a system that satisfies the expectations of its stakeholders. Despite tremendous effort in the field, recent studies demonstrate this is objective is not always achieved. In this paper, we discuss one particularly challenging factor to Requirements Engineering projects, namely the change of requirements. We proposes a rough discussion of how learning and time explain requirements changes, how it can be introduced as a key variable in the formulation of the Requirements Engineering Problem, and how this induces costs for a requirements engineering project. This leads to a new discipline of requirements economics.