Improving the Exchange of Requirements and Specifications between Business Partners

Increasingly complex supplier-relationships dominate product development, independent of industries and products. Mostly the primary source of risks and later problems is insufficient coherence with requirements engineering methodology and collaboration between different business partners during the project. This article based on experiences from various industries and projects provides insight into how to effectively collaborate in requirements engineering. Methods and tools are one side of the medal, but true collaboration also means having a platform to effectively and efficiently exchange requirements, specifications and their entire change management across impacted stakeholders. The requirements interchange format (RIF) has quickly moved forward over the past two years first in automotive and currently starting in domains such as medical and aerospace. This paper describes typical RE collaboration scenarios and what we recommend in order to mitigate risks and thus effectively manage complex supplier relationships. We will not ldquosellrdquo any tool but rather indicate how RIF is applied in order to share, communicate and collaborate across different tools.