Supporting Distributed Collaborative Prioritization for WinWin Requirements Capture and Negotiations

One of the most common problems within a risk driven software collaborative development effort is prioritizing items such as requirements, goals, and stakeholder win-conditions. Requirements have proven particularly sticky in this as it is often the case that they can not be fully implemented when time and resources are limited introducing additional risk to the project. A practical approach to mitigating this risk in alignment with the WinWin development approach is to have the critical stakeholders for the project collaboratively negotiate requirements into priority bins which then are scheduled into an appropriate incremental development life cycle. We have constructed a system called the Distributed Collaboration Priorities Tool (DCPT) to assist in collaborative prioritization of development items. DCPT offers a structurally guided approach to collaborative prioritization much in the spirit of USC’s WinWin requirements capture and negotiation system. In this paper, we will discuss the prioritization models implemented within DCPT via an actual prioritization of new WinWin system features. We also discuss DCPT’s two-way integration with WinWin system, some experiences using DCPT, and current research directions.