RE for ERP: Requirements Management for the Development of Packaged Software Baan Company

Abstract

Requirements Engineering within packaged software companies is quite different from RE in custom software development projects. As Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software covers functionality for the complete spectrum of business functions in industrial organizations, the management of large volumes of requirements from customers, possibly all over the world, is a non-trivia1 task. Collecting and prioritizing requirements, maintaining complex dependency structures, cost/value assessments, base-lining and re-scoping techniques call for dedicated requirement management methods with corresponding tools. We will discuss the industrial practices of Requirements Engineering and Requirements Management, and illustrate these with the RM methods and tools for the development of the Baan ERP products. We will end with an overview of research opportunities in Requirements Engineering motivated from the industrial perspective.