Understanding requirements engineering practices for packaged software implementation

Requirements engineering approaches are appropriate when software is to be developed from scratch. However, in most organization, new software is now created by integrating functionality from existing software and components or by implementing packaged software. In such cases, it makes little sense to specify requirements in terms of what the software should do - the functionality is already defined in this software. Rather, we argue that it is more appropriate to consider the software requirements from a misalignments perspective - what functions software provides and who needs that functions to do their job and what misalignments between software functions and users´ needs. To explore this area, we study cases of packaged software (PS) implementation in two software development companies. Our research design follows an interpretive approach, in which analysis was undertaken using an inductive approach. From an analysis of the cases, we induced a theoretical model explaining the requirement engineering practices (REP) for PS implementation.