Social Influence in Agile Requirements Engineering
This work tackles communication and negotiation issues in agile requirements engineering for software development teams, but it is incremental as it builds on existing studies and proposes a research plan rather than presenting new results.
The paper addresses the challenge of social-psychological factors influencing requirements in agile development due to increased face-to-face communication, proposing that knowledge of social influence research can be leveraged to benefit negotiators, and suggests a plan for conducting research through experimentation.
Agile requirements engineering implies more complex communication patterns since even the developers are supposed to have direct contact with customers. With more face-to-face communication comes social-psychological factors influencing the requirements. Studies have pointed at the importance of negotiation training, but I argue that more basic human traits can be triggered in favor of the negotiator with the most knowledge of social influence research and practice. I suggest a plan of how research in social influence and requirements facilitation can be conducted, mostly through experimentation.