Finding Success in Rapid Collaborative Requirements Negotiation Using Wiki and Shaper

Defining requirements without satisfying success critical stakeholders often leads to expensive project failures. Enabling interdisciplinary stakeholders to rapidly and effectively collaborate in development of globally-usable software-intensive systems remains a major challenge. At USC, 32 real-client, graduate-level team projects experimented with using the wiki-based requirements negotiation support tool WikiWinWin over a two- year period. Data collected from these projects indicated project outcome is correlated with several usage aspects, including early use, amount of use, frequency of use, shaper use, and evolving of negotiation artifacts. Several changes made based on our first-year's experience also showed improvements in cost-effectiveness. User feedback generally confirmed that using a wiki-based negotiation tool was beneficial, and that improving on wiki-tool ease of use would yield further client satisfaction in the future.