Antecedents for Successful Collaboration in Requirements Engineering

TL;DR

This paper investigates social factors like social ties, knowledge sharing, and flexibility that influence successful collaboration in requirements engineering teams, emphasizing human-related issues over technical methods.

Contribution

It highlights the importance of social and human factors such as flexibility and transactive memory in enhancing RE team collaboration, filling a gap in existing technical-focused research.

Findings

Flexibility and transactive memory are key for collaboration.

Social ties and knowledge sharing impact RE team success.

Human factors outweigh technical methods in collaboration effectiveness.

Abstract

The main focus of the requirements engineering (RE) literature has been on the technical aspects related to the RE projects. Furthermore, research has mainly focused on the specific methods for collecting the requirements for an information system. To fill this gap, this paper studies the contribution of social factors, such as social ties, knowledge sharing and flexibility, to successful collaboration in RE teams. Data were collected from a successful RE and development project in a public sector company in Finland. The results suggest that human-related issues, such as flexibility and transactive memory, were important for collaborative work in the RE team studied. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for theory and suggesting practical guidelines to enhance collaborative work in RE teams.