Requirements engineering, expectations management, and the Two Cultures

One of the difficulties in requirements negotiation is to determine a feasible and mutually satisfactory set of requirements for the developer and the user, a problem related to C.P. Snow's (1959) "Two Cultures" problem. During the last year of our experience with an annual series of digital library projects, we have been experimenting with expectations management and domain specific lists of "simplifiers" and "complicators", as a way to address the "Two Cultures" problem involving librarians and computer scientists. Initial results indicate that the simplifiers and complicators approach successfully reduced the number of projects having serious feasibility problems, and helped manage the expectations of both the developers and the customers/users. We see no obstacles to applying the approach to other domains.