Björn Regnell

In this final issue of the year, we mark a milestone: IEEE Software’s 40th anniversary—a ruby jubilee! While this column still awaits the silver achievement badge (25 years)—Suzanne Robertsson founded it in the early millennium—I’m pleased to present a discussion with two seasoned professors of requirements engineering. They will share their personal reflections on the discipline over the past four decades. I’m particularly pleased to feature a retrospective by the new retiree, Prof. Sandahl. Naturally, we conclude with an outlook on what is to come. Long live the new quadragenarian!—Markus Borg

Context: In the Requirements Engineering (RE) process of an Open Source Software (OSS) community, an involved firm is a stakeholder among many. Conflicting agendas may create miss-alignment with the firm's internal requirements strategy. In communities with meritocratic governance or with aspects thereof, a firm has the opportunity to affect the RE process in line with their own agenda by gaining influence through active and symbiotic engagements. Objective: The focus of this study has been to identify what aspects that firms should consider when they assess their need of influencing the RE process in an OSS community, as well as what engagement practices that should be considered in order to gain this influence. Method: Using a design science approach, 21 interviews with 18 industry professionals from 12 different software-intensive firms were conducted to explore, design and validate an artifact for the problem context. Results: A Community Strategy Framework (CSF) is presented to help firms create community strategies that describe if and why they need influence on the RE process in a specific (meritocratic) OSS community, and how the firm could gain it. The framework consists of aspects and engagement practices. The aspects help determine how important an OSS project and its community is from business and technical perspectives. A community perspective is used when considering the feasibility and potential in gaining influence. The engagement practices are intended as a tool-box for how a firm can engage with a community in order to build influence needed. Conclusion: It is concluded from interview-based validation that the proposed CSF may provide support for firms in creating and tailoring community strategies and help them to focus resources on communities that matter and gain the influence needed on their respective RE processes.

Context: Software-intensive organizations’ rationale for sharing Open Source Software (OSS) may be driven by both idealistic, strategic and commercial objectives, and include both monetary as well as non-monetary benefits. To gain the potential benefits, an organization may need to consider what they share and how, while taking into account risks, costs and other complexities.Objective: This study aims to empirically investigate objectives and complexities organizations need to consider and balance between when deciding on what software to share as OSS, when to share it, and whether to create a new or contribute to an existing community.Method: A multiple-case study of three case organizations was conducted in two research cycles, with data gathered from interviews with 20 practitioners from these organizations. The data was analyzed qualitatively in an inductive and iterative coding process.Results: 12 contribution objectives and 15 contribution complexities were found. Objectives include opportunities for improving reputation, managing suppliers, managing partners and competitors, and exploiting externally available knowledge and resources. Complexities include risk of loosing control, risk of giving away competitive advantage, risk of creating negative exposure, costs of contributing, and the possibility and need to contribute to an existing or new community.Conclusions: Cross-case analysis and interview validation show that the identified objectives and complexities offer organizations a possibility to reflect on and adapt their contribution strategies based on their specific contexts and business goals.

Deciding the optimal project scope that fulfills the needs of the most important stakeholders is challenging due to a plethora of aspects that may impact decisions. Large companies that operate in rapidly changing environments experience frequently changing customer needs which force decision makers to continuously adjust the scope of their projects. Change intensity is further fueled by fierce market competition and hard time-to-market deadlines. Staying in control of the changes in thousands of features becomes a major issue as information overload hinders decision makers from rapidly extracting relevant information. This paper presents a visual technique, called Feature Survival Charts+ (FSC+), designed to give a quick and effective overview of the requirements scoping process for Very Large-Scale Requirements Engineering (VLSRE). FSC+ were applied at a large company with thousands of features in the database and supported the transition from plan-driven to a more dynamic and change-tolerant release scope management process. FSC+ provides multiple views, filtering, zooming, state-change intensity views, and support for variable time spans. Moreover, this paper introduces five decision archetypes deduced from the dataset and subsequently analyzed and the atomic decision visualization that shows the frequency of various decisions in the process. The capabilities and usefulness of FSC+, decision patterns (state changes that features undergo) and atomic decision visualizations are evaluated through interviews with practitioners who found utility in all techniques and indicated that their inherent flexibility was necessary to meet the varying needs of the stakeholders.

Project retrospectives can be powerful tools for project teams to collectively identify communication gaps and practices to improve for future projects. However, even if project members take the time for a retrospective, it can be hard to correctly remember and jointly discuss past events in a constructive way. Fact-based timelines that visualize a project's events offer a possible solution.

Project retrospectives can be a powerful tool for process improvement through obtaining new insights. However pure experience-based reflections may lead to incorrect conclusions. Our method, evidence-based timeline retrospectives (EBTR), mitigates this risk by providing a pre-generated timeline that visualises project history based on evidence rather than relying on subjective opinions and biased memories. Through a comparative study of two cases, a set of variation points has been evaluated. The variation points enable configuring the EBTR method to different contexts and retrospective goals. The results indicate that by selecting certain variations the EBTR method can be configured to support either wide assessments (e.g. the overall impact of a new process) or assessments of a specific process area. For example, through using open or semi-structured discussions, or by varying the applied timeline technique.