Why and How to Balance Alignment and Diversity of Requirements Engineering Practices in Automotive
This work addresses a specific problem for automotive systems engineers by providing incremental guidance to manage diverse practices while ensuring alignment, particularly near release phases.
The paper tackled the challenge of balancing alignment and diversity in Requirements Engineering practices across automotive teams by studying Requirements Information Models in four companies, finding that such balance is crucial and deriving practical recommendations for managing these models throughout the requirements lifecycle.
In large-scale automotive companies, various requirements engineering (RE) practices are used across teams. RE practices manifest in Requirements Information Models (RIM) that define what concepts and information should be captured for requirements. Collaboration of practitioners from different parts of an organization is required to define a suitable RIM that balances support for diverse practices in individual teams with the alignment needed for a shared view and team support on system level. There exists no guidance for this challenging task. This paper presents a mixed methods study to examine the role of RIMs in balancing alignment and diversity of RE practices in four automotive companies. Our analysis is based on data from systems engineering tools, 11 semi-structured interviews, and a survey to validate findings and suggestions. We found that balancing alignment and diversity of RE practices is important to consider when defining RIMs. We further investigated enablers for this balance and actions that practitioners take to achieve it. From these factors, we derived and evaluated recommendations for managing RIMs in practice that take into account the lifecycle of requirements and allow for diverse practices across sub-disciplines in early development, while enforcing alignment of requirements that are close to release.