Repeatable quality assurance techniques for requirements negotiations

Many software projects fail because early life-cycle defects such as ill-defined requirements are not identified and removed. Therefore, quality assurance (QA) techniques for defect detection and prevention play an important role. The effectiveness and efficiency of QA approaches has been empirically evaluated. In this paper we discuss QA techniques optimized for requirements negotiations. In particular, we focus on negotiations using the EasyWinWin approach. We present (1) repeatable techniques for checking quality throughout negotiations as well as (2) role-oriented inspection techniques helping a project team to reduce unnecessary complexity and to mitigate risks stemming from defects in requirements negotiation results. We present the results of a thorough feasibility study we conducted to test our approach.