Deciding the optimal project scope that fulfills the needs of the most important stakeholders is challenging due to a plethora of aspects that may impact decisions. Large companies that operate in rapidly changing environments experience frequently changing customer needs which force decision makers to continuously adjust the scope of their projects. Change intensity is further fueled by fierce market competition and hard time-to-market deadlines. Staying in control of the changes in thousands of features becomes a major issue as information overload hinders decision makers from rapidly extracting relevant information. This paper presents a visual technique, called Feature Survival Charts+ (FSC+), designed to give a quick and effective overview of the requirements scoping process for Very Large-Scale Requirements Engineering (VLSRE). FSC+ were applied at a large company with thousands of features in the database and supported the transition from plan-driven to a more dynamic and change-tolerant release scope management process. FSC+ provides multiple views, filtering, zooming, state-change intensity views, and support for variable time spans. Moreover, this paper introduces five decision archetypes deduced from the dataset and subsequently analyzed and the atomic decision visualization that shows the frequency of various decisions in the process. The capabilities and usefulness of FSC+, decision patterns (state changes that features undergo) and atomic decision visualizations are evaluated through interviews with practitioners who found utility in all techniques and indicated that their inherent flexibility was necessary to meet the varying needs of the stakeholders.

A key component in successfully managing software products is to properly, and in a timely manner, identify and secure competitive advantage by innovation via feature differentiation. Although open source software (OSS) is not a new idea, several product development companies that operate in a market-driven context have started to use open source solutions as core software components in their products. Adopting open source core components implies a lower degree of control over software development and increased business risk associated with integrating differentiating contributions into the core release stream. Whether and how to adjust the current requirements management practices after the adoption of OSS components to fully benefit from the concept of open innovation has not yet been empirically explored. We outline experiences and challenges related to leveraging open innovation via engaging in OSS identified during 19 interviews with practitioners occupying different roles in the requirements management process at a large company followed by four validation interviews with other practitioners. We then propose a research agenda for requirements and decision management in the open innovation context and suggest which challenges in requirements engineering open innovation affects.

Daily build is a software development paradigm that originated in the PC industry to get control of the development process, while still allowing the focus on end user requirements and code. The PC industry used daily build to avoid chaos in increasingly larger applications in an environment without a strong development process. Ericsson Radio Systems has chosen to implement daily build to increase the focus on end user requirements and code, but from a different starting point with a traditionally strong development process. In this article we discuss our experiences with daily build and feature oriented development in this context. We also relate our experience to the concept of extreme programming, arguing that our ideas can help extend the applicability of extreme programming beyond small co-located projects.