A Communication protocol for requirements engineering processes

The goal of the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is to move from the problem space to a solution space. Communication among all involved in SDLC plays a vital role in providing solution to various problems of the customer. Amongst all SDLC phases, Requirements Engineering (RE) is the most communication rich phase. RE of large and complex projects demands frequent communication between large number of roles exchanging messages of different types and sizes. Unstructured communication can result in situations of both information overloading and information withholding leading to poor RE process effectiveness and efficiency. We attempt to solve this problem by using an empirically pilot-tested communication protocol, as part of our metrics based RE Process Improvement (REPI) framework. We developed this protocol to significantly enhance RE effectiveness and efficiency by solving communication problems in RE. We examined the protocol against the generalization of communication problems in RE of two large software development organizations. The initial results show that our communication protocol may provide effective support to the metrics-based REPI framework, which is the larger part of our research.