A Comparison Study in Software Requirements Negotiation

Authors: Alexander Egyed and Barry Boehm

In a period of two years, two rather independent experiments were conducted at the University of Southern California. In 1995, 23 three-person teams negotiated the requirements for a hypothetical library system. Then in 1996, 14 six-person teams negotiated the requirements for real multimedia related library systems.

A number of hypotheses were created to test how real software projects differ from hypothetical ones. Other hypotheses address differences in uniformity and repeatability.

The results indicate that repeatability in 1996 was even harder to achieve then in 1995 (Egyed-Boehm, 1996). Nevertheless, this paper presents some surprising commonalties between both years that indicate some areas of uniformity.

In both years, the same overall development process (spiral model) was followed, the same negotiation tools (WinWin System) were used, and the same people were doing the analysis of the findings. Thus, the comparison is less blurred by fundamental differences like terminology, process, etc.

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