Requirement management : Barriers preventing the establishment of structured methods in software development

Abstract: A major problem for companies within the software development industry is that their customers request more advanced technology and at the same time, there is a demand for products being developed in a faster pace. Meanwhile, there is a risk that the demands from the customers might change during the development phase, as a consequence of an industry that is characterized by continuous development of more advanced technology and a competitive setting. There is a great challenge for companies to cope with these changes and by not managing these correctly, severe economic consequences might occur. In order to manage these situations, the importance of a requirement engineering process is emphasized by previous research. However, even though a process has been implemented throughout an organization, there are still factors that prevent it from being established over time. This study focuses on the barriers that prevent the use of a structured method in requirement management, by conducting a case study at Scania. The environmental context was software development for embedded systems. Data collections in form of interviews were conducted at different departments at Scania to investigate existing barriers in the development process regarding requirements. The results from the respondents indicate problems with the requirement management from different perspectives. Aspects such as lack of time, understanding of the development chain as well as the frequent changes in design are emphasized as barriers for adapting to the existing requirement management process, leading to that the involvement of different user needs are disregarded. Through these results, conclusions are drawn which will serve as a base for future recommendations to manage the requirement management process. These comprises the importance of identifying relevant stakeholders, of how new processes and tools are distributed among employees and the importance of continuous education of the newly implemented processes. This intend to highlight better ways of managing different user needs that hopefully, in the end, will lead to that more requirements are being considered at an earlier stage in the development.