Industrial Usage of Requirements : Ambition and Impeding Factors

Sammanfattning: Organizations are changing and growing constantly, which leads to higher complexity in development processes. For the development of complex products in a systematic way, requirements provide support. At Scania, it is of interest to investigate how engineers in the company work with requirements since a new safety standard is set to be implemented, which entails a change in the work with requirements. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate the ambition for working with requirements at Scania and to identify factors that can impede a change improvement in requirement engineering. This study aids in providing support for applying new practices when implementing a new safety standard. Literature within the fields of organizational change, change management and requirement engineering are considered. A qualitative case study at an automotive OEM has been conducted, where data was collected through 21 semi-structured interviews and internal documents. The findings show that the ambition level from the company perspective is not clear at Scania, thus engineers and units at the company set their own individual ambition for working with requirements and work in different ways across the organization. Also, several impeding factors such as standardization and different processes have been identified that could impede a change initiative for an improvement in the requirement engineering process. The findings contribute to the understanding of engineers purposes and motivation for requirement engineering. Furthermore, a change initiative in requirement engineering is investigated, where the impeding factors for the change are identified. Also, safety critical system development using requirement engineering is explored. It is suggested that future studies could compare other units and companies requirement engineering, and also leverage qualitative methods. Originality – To the best knowledge of the authors this is the first study to examine change initiative using Schein’s change model in a requirement engineering setting.