Customer Involvement in Distributed Requirements Engineering

Abstract

The graduation project is run as an internship at software company Exact. The company wants to reduce the time to market for their products. To achieve this objective, Exact wants to adopt agile development and is aiming towards the implementation of a development process that is both globally distributed and Scrum-like. The project’s goal in this objective is to design and validate a process, with which a set of product requirements is engineered and in parallel the products design is being developed at at least two distributed locations. This process needs to iterate between these locations, but at the same time it needs to work towards a non-ambiguous, concrete and focused backlog with which development can do their work. Based on interviews and constraints, the project was scoped down to focus on the verification of requirements with customers. After research in this area, a prototype is created and tested, which should establish a feedback loop on conceptual requirements items in a virtual community. The test results have led to a set of recommendations for customer involvement in a distributed requirements engineering process.