Communication artifacts and interaction evaluation for requirements engineering

This paper aims to answer an important question regarding the development of new information systems (IS): "What is the predominant factor for the selection of communication artifacts for requirements engineering (RE)?". Many researchers have focused on the RE and communication as separate disciplines, but little or no research addressed the RE communication issues. These problems are important because they often lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the gathered requirements. We develop expectations about the RE communication process based on prior literature from both disciplines and we test them through several case studies. Our methodology consists of analysis of six case studies we investigated. We conducted interviews and then we used the data to answer the research question and to see if the data from the case studies were consistent with our expectations. The paper contributes to existing literature, as it provides evidence that organizational environment is the predominant factor in the selection of communication artifacts, and that the motivation of the participants plays a key role when determining the levels of interaction amongst participants. And finally, we investigate the transitional RE phases and discover that they are viewed as overlapping with the main RE phases and that there is some cross-communication between the participants during those transitional phases.