Requirements before the requirements: understanding the upstream impacts

Being successful in product development means to deliver the right products or solutions at the right time for the right markets. While requirements engineering (RE) plays a key role in selecting and managing requirements for a given project, the "upstream process" before the project start often remains vague. Typically this upstream process is decoupled from the project related RE processes, which creates lots of project deficiencies, such as changes in requirements, and ultimately delayed release. We take the position that only by integrating upstream (e.g., roadmap) and downstream (i.e., project) processes, projects are successful. This field study is supported by data from 246 industry projects over a period of two years. We found that four described techniques must be used simultaneously in order to see tangible performance improvement. Each technique is explained by concrete and practical experiences.