Developing groupware for requirements negotiation: lessons learned

Defining requirements is a complex and difficult process, and defects in the process often lead to costly project failures. There is no complete and well-defined set of requirements waiting to be discovered in system development. Different stakeholders: users, customers, managers, domain experts, and developers, come to the project with diverse expectations and interests. Requirements emerge in a highly collaborative, interactive, and interdisciplinary negotiation process that involves heterogeneous stakeholders. At the University of Southern California's Center for Software Engineering, we have developed a series of groupware implementations for the WinWin requirements negotiation approach. The WinWin approach involves having a system's success-critical stakeholders participate in a negotiation process so they can converge on a mutually satisfactory or win-win set of requirements. The WinWin groupware system, which has evolved over four generations, enables and facilitates heterogeneous stakeholder participation and collaboration. Each generation reflects an increase in our understanding of what is needed for successful WinWin groupware operations and technology support. The authors present the major lessons they learned during WinWin's development.