Contemporary Challenges in Requirements Discovery and Validation: Two Case Studies in Complex Environments - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 57

So there's this mapping that has to take place with every client, including our own clients
because every agency has slight differences when it comes to mapping because those are
content, not context. We're going to have to do that. There's enough work involved in doing
that.
Thus, the two project environments encountered significant difficulty flowing
from the complexity of the broader systems landscape with which their focal sys-
tems had to interact. In both cases, project leaders reflected the perception that
the appropriate solutions to these complexity-based challenges had not yet been
identified, but that it would emerge over time as the system matured.
5.12 Assessing Outcomes
As with most of the challenges discussed, the difficulty of assessing outcomes with
respect to meeting requirements of stakeholders was relevant in both cases. In the
University SIS project, the initial implementation of the platform surfaced a number
of necessary modifications that the project team had failed to identify and test for
during the customization of the PeopleSoft platform. The project team members felt
that their ability to predict the outcomes of the system would have been enhanced if
the business stakeholders had assisted them in identifying possible user behaviors:
I guess a lot of the challenge was the ownership in the process mostly from the business side.
We talked about making a commitment to get the spec in on time, for example, and under-
standing that it would affect them down the road as much as the technical team. Anticipating
how the system was going to work once it's been developed. Testing and finding things
before we put the software into production and before it's critical and before we have no
time to resolve the incidence. It was very difficult. - SIS Technical Consultant
In several cases, during the initial implementation of the platform, interfaces
between the SIS system and a range of legacy platforms in use by individual schools
failed to work as anticipated based on variation in data entry and reporting processes
by the end users.
On the IPSI project, the multi-party nature of the project created some imped-
iments to outcome assessment. Testing of the proposed system required receipt of
sufficient data from all anchor partners, but the flow of data was intermittent As the
BSI Senior Developer observed:
We can operate now and he [the Prosecutor] will have easily seventy-five percent of his
information coming in consistently exactly the way he wants it. That's a tremendous benefit
to him. So we're close to schedule. But we're having some issues getting the database so
we can test. I can't test anything yet because I don't have the database.
Thus, the complexity of the project context placed significant limitations on
the ability of the project team to test the feasibility of various requirements that
emerged. Here again, the project team expressed the hope that consistency would
emerge as the platform evolved.