Early Validation of Requirements in Distributed Product Development: an Industrial Case Study

An inevitable aspect of product development is that the developer needs to be sure what customers and other stakeholders want from the system under development. Plenty of best practices for requirements engineering have been introduced in the scientific literature, as well as studies about the related pitfalls, but requirements engineering still remains a problematic area in product development. Operating in distributed development environment not only emphasizes these problems, but also creates new ones. Typically the biggest challenges for industrial practitioners are the lack of awareness about the existing solutions as well as the difficulty of selecting the right methods for certain kind of situations during the development. In this article, one potential solution for assistance in the selection of requirements validation practices in distributed product development environment is presented. Based on interviews made within the company and solutions found from literature, a proposal for potential improvement actions is presented.