A descriptive classification for end user-relevant decisions of large-scale IT projects

Large-scale IT projects with traditional development methods are still very common in practice. These projects mostly involve the end user in the beginning and at the end of the development. However, there are also user-relevant decisions in the phases between. Thus, it is important to investigate what decisions are made and which of them are user-relevant. Thus we suggested in our previous work a preliminary classification based on the TORE method to structure decisions. In this paper, we validate this classification and collected exemplary user-relevant decisions by experts in large-scale IT projects. As part of our research in user-developer communication, we conducted an interview series with twelve experts. The interviews confirmed that our previously suggested classification is comprehensive and helpful to structure decisions and revealed several amendments. The examples given by the experts enabled us to collect a comprehensive list of end user-relevant decisions, and thus lead to our descriptive classification.