Surfacing tacit knowledge in requirements negotiation: experiences using EasyWinWin

Defects in the requirements definition process often lead to costly project failures. One eminent problem is that it can be difficult to take deliberate advantage of important tacit knowledge of success-critical stakeholders. People know more that they can ever tell. Implicit stakeholder goals, hidden assumptions, unshared expectations often result in severe problems in the later stages of software development. We present a set of collaborative techniques that support a team of success-critical stakeholders in surfacing tacit knowledge during systems development projects. We discuss these techniques in the context of the EasyWinWin requirements negotiation methodology and illustrate our approach with examples from real-world negotiations.