HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY Department of Computer Science and Engineering

II HELSINKI UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY ABSTRACT OF MASTER’S THESIS Author: Title of the thesis: Date: 7.1.2002 Mikael Johnson Towards Web-based Requirements Management – a Case Study in a Distributed Software Development Organisation Number of Pages: 89 Department: Professorship: Computer Science and Engineering Tik-121 User Interfaces and Usability Supervisor and Instructor: Professor Marko Nieminen When user-centred design (UCD) methods are introduced in product development, the design is evaluated throughout the project with users. The user evaluation results in a large number of functional and non-functional requirements, which need to be managed to let the user needs drive the design. This master’s thesis presents the first part of the TEKES-funded VIKSU-research project that was created by Helsinki University of Technology and Teamware Group with the aim of developing a virtual desktop that guides a UCD process and supports distributed software development. The focus is set on Teamware’s requirement management (RM) process , which is examined from the viewpoint of Requirements Engineering (RE). The widely accepted approach for IT development in general, the UCD approach (ISO 13407) is applied in this thesis, as well as by Teamware. The product development work at Teamware is also examined looking through the glasses of Activity Theory, which precepts activity, action, and operation influenced the methods used. Analysing existing web-based RM tools, it was found that they do not support distributed multi-site software development, which implies that a RM tool would only be a partial and local solution for the requirements coordinator at Teamware. However, even if the RM tools develop, they might not fully support the requirement review meeting at Teamware, since the meeting also makes strategic product decisions. This implies that the Teamware RM process cannot be studied from the viewpoint of RE alone. It needs to be studied as a part of the product development process, and as the interaction between management, marketing, sales, and development. The new information model that was developed in this thesis to support the Teamware RM process divided the requirements into user needs and solutions, reflecting the idea that user requirements should be grouped by the context of use, while functional requirements should be grouped by the product components. However, through the four research questions in this thesis, it became clear that it is not reasonable to continue the VIKSU-project by constructing a web-based RM component for the virtual desktop. Instead, it could be viable to put the RM component in its context by defining the concept of the virtual desktop starting from the larger framework of product development.