Situated Boundary Spanning: An Empirical Investigation of Requirements Engineering Practices in Product Family Development.

Requirements Engineering (RE) faces considerable challenges that are often related to boundaries between various stakeholders involved in the software development process. These challenges may be addressed by boundary spanning practices. We examine how boundary spanning can be adapted to address RE challenges in Product Family Development (PFD), a context that involves complex RE. We study two different development approaches, namely, conventional and agile PFD, because these present considerably different challenges. Our findings from a multisite case study present boundary spanning as a solution to improve the quality of RE processes and highlight interesting differences in how boundary spanner roles and boundary objects are adapted in conventional and agile PFD.