Software requirements as negotiated win conditions

Current processes and support systems for software requirements determination and analysis often neglect the critical needs of important classes of stakeholders, and limit themselves to the concerns of the developers, users and customers. These stakeholders can include maintainers, interfacers, testers, product line managers, and sometimes members of the general public. This paper describes the results to date in researching and prototyping a next-generation process model (NGPM) and support system (NGPSS) which directly addresses these issues. The NGPM emphasizes collaborative processes, involving all of the significant constituents with a stake in the software product. Its conceptual basis is a set of “theory W” (win-win) extensions to the spiral model of software development