Evaluating the Effectiveness of a Collaborative Requirements Engineering Modeling Notation for Planning Globally Distributed Projects

摘要

In many software projects, stakeholders are distributed across different time zones, organizations, and geographical locations. This creates challenges for conducting people-intensive activities such as requirements elicitation, analysis, and prioritization. To address these problems we previously introduced a visual modeling notation to help project managers plan the collaboration infrastructures needed to support requirements-related activities in globally distributed projects. In this paper we present a refined version of the notation and report on an observational study we conducted in which project managers used our notation to plan globally distributed projects. Results show that the modeling activity and the resulting diagrams helped the project managers to better understand the communication needs for the project, to identify potential communication and collaboration problems, and to proactively address the infrastructure and communication needs for the project.