Contact Information

Dr. Alexander Egyed
Johannes Kepler University
Altenbergerstr. 69
4040 Linz, Austria
http://www.sea.uni-linz.ac.at
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WinWin Requirements Negotiation Processes-A Multi-Project Analysis

Authors: Barry Boehm and Alexander Egyed

Fifteen 6-member-teams were involved in negotiating requirements for multimedia software systems for the Library of the University of Southern California. The re-quirements negotiation used the Stakeholder WinWin success model and the USC WinWin negotiation model (Win Condition-Issue-Option-Agreement) and groupware system. The negotiated results were integrated into a Life Cycle Objectives (LCO) package for the project, including descriptions of the system's requirements, operational concept, architecture, life cycle plan, and feasibility rationale. These were subsequently elaborated into a Life Cycle Architecture package including a prototype; six of these were then implemented as products.

A number of hypotheses were formulated, tested, and evolved regarding the WinWin negotiation processes and their effectiveness in supporting the development of effective LCO packages, in satisfying Library clients, and in stimulating cooperation among stakeholders. Other hypotheses involved identification of WinWin improvements, relationships among negotiation strategies on LCO package and project outcomes.

Some of the more illuminating results were:

  • Most of the stakeholder Win Conditions were non-controversial (were not involved in Issues). Also, most Issues were decoupled from other Issues and were easy to resolve. This implies that requirements nego-tiation support systems should focus at least as much on handling simple relationships well as on handling complex relationships well.
  • Similar applications projects did not follow similar processes, confirming our previous conclusion [11] that repeatability of software front-end processes is not a realistic goal.
  • The strongest positive effects of using the WinWin approach were increasing cooperativeness, focusing participants on key issues, reducing friction, and fa-cilitating distributed collaboration.
  • The major improvements for the WinWin approach (now being implemented) were increasing WinWin training, reducing usage overhead, and concurrent negotiation and prototyping.

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