Towards Business Requirements Traceability to Drive COTS-Based System Implementation Success: Brief Dispatches from the Trenches

This paper proposes that requirements engineering for COTS-based business systems should be flexible to cater for changes in users’ requirements during the development process. It suggests exposing in real-time the traceability of development activity to user requirements as a key mechanism to facilitate communication between the systems development and user communities. The channels of communication between these communities should use appropriate encoding and protocols to simplify all parties’ decoding tasks.