Case studies in just-in-time requirements analysis

Many successful software projects do not follow the commonly assumed best practice of engineering well-formed requirements at project inception. Instead, the requirements are captured less formally, and only fully elaborated once the implementation begins, known as `just-in-time' requirements. Given the apparent disparity between best practices and actual practices, several questions arise. One concerns the nature of requirements engineering in non-traditional forms. What types of tools and practices are used? Another is formative: what types of problems are encountered in just-intime requirements, and how might we support organizations in solving those problems? In this paper we conduct separate case studies on the requirements practices of three open-source software projects. Using an individual task as the unit of analysis, we study how the project proceeds from requirement to implementation, in order to understand how each project manages requirements. We then comment on the benefits and problems of just-in-time requirements analysis. This allows us to propose research directions about requirements engineering in just-in-time settings. In particular, we see the need to better understand the context of practice, and the need to properly evaluate the cost of decisions. We propose a taxonomy to describe the requirements practices spectrum from fully formal to just-in-time.