Exploiting COTS-Based RE Methods: An Experience Report

This paper reports on an exploratory study of a key hypothesis of enterprise resource planning (ERP) requirements engineering (RE) adoption, namely that framing applications to the packaged RE model leads to integral practices and economic development. We analyzed two interrelated pilot projects developed for a business division of a large IT company, using Oracle's commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) application implementation method (AIM). The study showed that AIM RE improved team collaboration and project management experience, but needed to make hidden assumptions explicit to support data visibility and integrity. Our study can help practitioners generate more effective and mature processes when exploiting COTS-based RE methods.