Aligning Software Project Decisions: a Case Study

Recent research in software engineering has highlighted the need to ensure alignment between business objectives, customer requirements and product development. If the business is to meet its strategic objectives, the Requirements Engineering (RE) activities must be executed in a manner such that they support these higher level objectives. A clear alignment between RE activities and the strategic objectives of the organization should underscore the merit of IT investment and the opportunities for competitive advantage that can be pursued as a result by the organization. This research begins with a detailed investigation of the complexity of decision-making during RE activities on business, product and project levels. Secondly, it investigates 'in-project' level RE decisions and provides empirical findings from an industrial case study. The findings show that RE project related decisions are influenced by business and product requirements. Although, the software developers in this study recognized the importance of developing software products that meet customer requirements and that are aligned with business objectives, they found it difficult to achieve this when the customer was external and the communication was a major problem. A lack of understanding the business strategy and a lack of communication between business, product and project level stakeholders were among the problems that are highlighted by this study.