From Screenplays to Podcasts - New Perspectives on Improving Requirements Communication in Interdisciplinary Teams

Abstract

Software engineering projects are highly collaborative. They require interdisciplinary teams to cooperate and exchange information efficiently and effectively to successfully achieve their project goals within time and budget. In this collaborative context, the communication of requirements plays an important role in enabling all team members to accomplish their engineering activities. However, establishing a shared understanding of the requirements is challenging. In this perspective paper, we reflect on such challenges, which we experienced in an ongoing software development project, and propose novel approaches that seem promising for tackling the identified challenges. These ideas stem from best practices of non- SE disciplines such as criminology, film studies & dramatics, journalism & authoring, and psychology. Moreover, we outline our future research agenda, which comprises research questions and activities that aim to further elaborate on the envisioned ideas and to apply, respectively evaluate, their effect on improving requirements communication. This research agenda is intended to motivate the RE community to contribute to our research activities and to encourage both practitioners and researchers to get inspired by other disciplines as this is surely beneficial when it comes to addressing current challenges.