Towards understanding requirements engineering in IT ecosystems

IT ecosystems are large software systems that consist of various, constantly interacting and partly autonomous subsystems as well as stakeholders of the overall system. Because of these specific properties, such systems are a highly relevant research area in the field of requirements engineering. In this paper we describe our approach to investigate and to model the flow of requirements in IT ecosystems. We are currently applying this approach in a case study in the IBM Collaborative Lifecycle Management project. This project is of particular relevance to the requirements engineering community because of its open commercial approach. This paper contributes by highlighting challenges of requirements engineering in IT ecosystems, i.e. contextualizing requirements, mapping them to subsystems, and communicating them to stakeholders. We define research questions and describe a mixed method approach to answer them.