Cooperation, Requirements Analysis and CSCW

It is now widely recognised that CSCW has an important contribution to make in situations where business units need to collaborate across organisational boundaries. This chapter examines the particular problem of cooperation within requirements capture and analysis. A key problem within requirements analysis is one of communication between the designers of the system being proposed and the target users. The difficulties of user-designer communication are exacerbated when the users and the designers work for different organisations or for different business units within the same organisation.