Experiences integrating requirements engineering and business analysis. An empirical study of operations and management system procurement projects

This paper presents a study that has been done in the area of business analysis (BA) in support of requirements engineering (RE). It is argued that the competitive nature of software procurement poses problems to the integration of BA and RE. To investigate this claim, eight procurement and development projects in which BA has been used are studied. The collected data are analyzed using a set of indicators for achieved integration level. The study shows that the projects encountered the proposed difficulties. This is most apparent in projects involving customers formulating requests for proposals (RFPs). To alleviate the integration problems, new approaches to system procurement in which customer organizations and vendors cooperate more closely seem necessary.