Evidence-based timelines for project retrospectives — A method for assessing requirements engineering in context

Effective requirements engineering (RE) can support efficient development of successful products. However, assessing and improving how RE supports its context, i.e. the development life cycle, is non-trivial since many different roles and factors are involved over a long period of time. Project retrospectives may support project teams in reflecting on how requirements are agreed upon and communicated throughout a project. However, time is rarely taken for group reflection after project completion. Furthermore, project events may be recalled differently due to memory bias. We propose supporting project retrospective meetings by providing prepared evidence-based timelines visualizing the project history. The method was designed and evaluated in collaboration with a large telecommunications company using action research with the goal of assessing RE within the full development life-cycle. The initial evaluation results show that the method may support project retrospectives through fact-based memory recall and by enabling efficient and factual group discussions of RE in the context of the project life-cycle. In addition, some areas for improvement of the method have been identified, e.g. strengthened focus on expected outcome and clearer visual separation of evidence types.