Linking the business view to requirements engineering: long-term product planning by roadmapping

Companies moving into the software product business and growing in size face new challenges that cannot be tackled completely with old practices. For example, the future development steps of the off-the-shelf products cannot be negotiated with just one or a few customers any more. This means that practitioners should be able to take aspects such as their company's own strategy and available market information more effectively into account in such decision-making. However, usually the company or business unit strategy is so high level that the gap to single requirements documents is far too long. Roadmapping is one technique that companies have used for long-term product planning in order to link the business view to requirements engineering (RE), and to make more business oriented product development decisions. In addition, roadmapping has been used to share a common understanding about the future development steps of products with different stakeholders. However, the application of the technique is not always easy. This paper gives an overview of roadmapping as a technique, and describes lessons learned from one Finnish software product company that has developed and evaluated its own roadmapping processes in their organization.