SBIR Phase I: BrainStorm - Collaborative Customer Requirements Elicitation for Distributed Software Development

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will investigate methods for improving the process of requirements elicitation for geographically distributed software development teams. Most projects fail because requirements are not clearly articulated and captured. This project seeks to identify the methods that facilitate the elicitation of well-defined requirements, reduce complexity in the requirements process and evaluate the technical feasibility of developing a solution to address the problem. The approach is to (1) study the methods involved in requirements elicitation and their applicability to a distributed environment, (2) develop an algorithm to monitor and reduce process complexity and (3) investigate the technical feasibility of a collaborative platform with role-based access control. The anticipated outcomes from the project include the development of role-based templates that guide business stakeholders to articulate requirements through an algorithmically driven requirements elicitation process and a prototype for a Web-based collaboration platform with integrated role-based access control that enables this process. The proposed activity addresses a broad need in software engineering as well as in general product development. While several requirements management tools exist, eliciting unambiguous requirements from the business stakeholders is a process that is neither well-defined nor served by existing tools. As such, the value of such a solution to an enterprise includes ensuring higher probability of project success and a reduced time-to-market. In both the government and corporate sectors, this will result in optimized project expenditure and a product that meets the needs of the end user. The project also enhances the scientific understanding related to complexities in distributed software development and extends the current technological advances related to collaboration and security into an underserved domain of software engineering, namely, requirements elicitation.