Handling design-level requirements across distributed teams: Developing a new feature for 12 Danish mobile banking apps

Bankdata and Mjølner have cooperated in the development of a new feature for 12 Danish mobile banking apps. Bankdata is the main system provider and Mjølner is subcontractor. Different teams from Bankdata have collected requirements, developed the necessary backend and middleware software, and designed the user interface. One team from Mjølner has implemented the app feature. The cooperation between the teams was centered around design-level requirements. Our contribution is to describe and discuss a number of lessons learned regarding requirements representations, requirements tools, and cooperation process; we have faced challenges, which were amplified by our distributed teams set-up. We also briefly describe a number of initiatives we have launched recently to alleviate the problems and improve the handling of design-level requirements in our future cooperation.