Pragmatic Requirements Communication: The Handshaking Approach

Handshaking is an approach to communicate requirements from a customer to a supplier that allows the customer to use requirements for steering solution development in a pragmatic, goal-oriented manner. Feed-forward, realized by tailoring the requirements to the supplier, increases communication efficiency. Feedback, realized by reviewing a supplier's development intentions, helps assuring that the developed solution is acceptable. Combining feed-forward and feedback allows the customer and supplier to learn about each other's backgrounds and interests for even further increasing efficiency and effectiveness of requirements communication over time.

The communication between marketing, often represented by product management, and development has for a long time been considered to be successcritical for the development of new software products. At the same time the different backgrounds and interest of the two company functions make achieving a trusted shared requirements understanding a challenge. In this context, previous approaches have not provided practitioners with expected flexibility for exploring alternatives, did not support requirements engineering work sharing between the company functions, had acceptance problems because of excessive complexity and skill requirements, or could only be employed reactively rather than proactively to assure solution acceptance.

Handshaking uses Implementation Proposals and a simple negotiation process to propose, agree, and document a shared requirements understanding. An Implementation Proposal is a simple template that makes the relations between product management expectations and development intentions explicit, enhances the exploration of alternatives, encourages the discussion of otherwise hidden assumptions and effects of a solution, and prepares planning of solution development. Implementation Proposals embody goal-oriented reasoning patterns to evaluate solution alternatives, but do not require specific requirements engineering and specification skills. Negotiation assumes proactive communication from both parties and knowledge of the developed product's domain, however.