Towards a Theory of Requirements Negotiation

Journal article, 2005

Recent research on the management of requirements in industrial practice has shifted its focus of attention from the traditional perspective taken in systems engineering and engineering design literature that ?requirements comes first?, towards a perspective more including a ?dialogue between the requirement, its solution, and the customer/contractor?. This dialogue, in this paper regarded as requirements negotiation, is a natural way to understand and solve a design problem. This paper gives a background on this shift of focus using existing change-process theories and summarises requirements negotiation activities. Looking at related research areas, such as network theory and research on human judgement and decision-making different areas of attentions for future research are outlined.