Events Calendar

PhD Defense - Nupul Kukreja

PhD Candidate: Nupul Kukreja

Title: Social-Networking Based Collaborative Requirements Elicitation, Negotiation and Prioritization

Date: Monday, June 23rd, 2014

Time: 1 p.m.

Location: GFS 114

Committee:
Barrry Boehm (chair)
William Halfond
Ann Majchrzak (outside member)

Abstract:
Avoiding a major source of system and software project failures by finding more non-technical-user friendly methods of system definition and evolution has been a significant challenge. Another challenging problem, an outcome of the system definition process, is selecting system and software requirements to implement in a particular product or release. Business stakeholders strive to maximize return on investment by selecting the most valuable requirements for implementation. Deciding on the requirements to be selected entails a great deal of communication and coordination amongst the stakeholders to ascertain the priorities of the individual requirements.
With the advent of social networking and popularity of Facebook and Gmail, we have developed a radically different way for collaborative requirements management, negotiation and prioritization based on the WinWin negotiation model. The new avatar of the WinWin framework called ‘Winbook’ is based on the social networking paradigm, similar to Facebook and content organization using color coded labels, similar to Gmail and an 'Excel' like ability for prioritizing the requirements collaboratively.

The prioritized requirements aid in the planning and sequencing of implementation activities associated with the software system and provides a basis of a prioritized backlog from which the requirements can be ‘pulled’ for development. Changing business priorities may require a complete reprioritization of the backlog, leading to wasted effort. Individual change requests and new requirements need to be prioritized and inserted into the correct location in the backlog requiring high communication overhead.

In my thesis I present a social-networking inspired negotiation and two-step prioritization approach using a decision theoretic model, to negotiate and prioritize system and software requirements. I show how social-networking helps increase participation in online negotiation sessions and how the a rigorous prioritization model can help channelize the output of the negotiation and progress towards the implementation of the requirements - all in a value centric manner.

Location: Grace Ford Salvatori Hall Of Letters, Arts & Sciences (GFS) - 114

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Lizsl De Leon