1604 A Method of Analysis and Application of the Communication between Users and Vendors in the Requirements Phase of Software Development

Abstract

The failures of software development projects, such as delivery delays and excess of cost, often happen caused by the lack of user (purchaser)'s participation and/or the lack of communication between users and vendors in the requirements phase. Therefore, the importance of requirements definition method and analysis/evaluation of requirements process is generally recognized nowadays. The goal of this research is to predict the risks and quality related to requirements by calculating and analyzing the communication data between users and vendors in the requirements phase. Based on the prediction, the risks of project failure can be reduced by users' and/or project managers' early actions. This paper shows the relationship between the communication and quality of project, using categorized quantitative data from speeches in the meeting minutes and failure reports as from customer's testing of the customer-management system development project. Moreover, based on the result, we propose some ideas of usage of this analysis method in the real software development fields.