Title :
Competition and collaboration in requirements engineering: A case study of an emerging software ecosystem
Author :
Valenca, George ; Alves, C.M. ; Heimann, Virginia ; Jansen, Slinger ; Brinkkemper, Sjaak
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Stat. & Inf., Fed. Rural Univ. of Pernambuco, Recife, Brazil
Abstract :
Increasingly, small to medium software producing organisations are working together in collaboration networks to supply complex compositions of their products and services to customers. In this paper, we present a case study of two software companies that are evolving their partnership towards the creation of a software ecosystem. We investigate the impacts of their tightening partnership on software product management, with a focus on requirements engineering practices. We observe that the requirements definition and negotiation processes are directly affected by their fluid collaborative and competitive relationships. Power disputes, volatile roles and mismatches in release synchronisation are also aspects observed in the studied software ecosystem.We extract several observations from the case study that support small to medium software firms in making decisions within their software ecosystem.
Keywords :
organisational aspects; small-to-medium enterprises; software development management; systems analysis; collaboration networks; complex compositions; emerging software ecosystem; power disputes; requirements definition; requirements engineering practices; requirements negotiation processes; small-to-medium software producing organisations; software ecosystem; software firms; software product management; volatile roles; Collaboration; Companies; Ecosystems; Interviews; Planning; Software;
Conference_Titel :
Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2014 IEEE 22nd International
Conference_Location :
Karlskrona
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-3031-9
DOI :
10.1109/RE.2014.6912289