How interaction between roles shapes the communication structure in requirements-driven collaboration

Requirements engineering involves collaboration among many project team members. Driven by coordination needs, this collaboration relies on communication and knowledge that members have of their colleagues and related activities. Ineffective coordination with those who work on requirements dependencies may result in project failure. In this paper, we report on a study of roles and communication structures in the collaboration driven by interdependent requirements in a software team. Through on-site observations, interviews with the developers and application of social network analysis, we found that there was significant communication between diverse roles in the project, and identified what were the reasons for communication between the different roles. We also found that these interactions typically involved a core of requirements analysts and testers in close communication, that most often they involved critical members whose absence, whether temporary or permanent, would disrupt the information flow if removed from the project, as well as that new hires were mostly isolated from the team collaboration. Most interestingly we found that the emergent communication structure between the different roles in the project did not conform to the planned communication structure prescribed by the organization. These findings further our knowledge about collaboration driven by requirements, and provide some useful implications for research and development of collaborative tools to support the effective coordination of cross-functional teams in software development.