Formalizing Informal Stakeholder Decisions--A Hybrid Method Approach

Decisions are hard to make when available information is incomplete, inconsistent, and ambiguous. Moreover, good-sufficiently complete, consistent, traceable, and testable-requirements are a prerequisite for successful projects. Without understanding what the stakeholders really want and need and writing these requirements in a concise, understandable and testable manner, projects will not develop what the stakeholders wanted leading to either major late rework or project termination. During the development of the WinWin negotiation model and the EasyWinWin requirements negotiation method, we have gained considerable experience in capturing decisions made by stakeholders in over 100 projects. However, the transition from informal decisions to requirements specification is still a challenging problem. Based on our analysis of the projects to date, we have developed an integrated set of gap-bridging methods as a hybrid method to support stakeholders making better decisions in order to eliminate requirements related problems and ease the process of formality transition