Synchronous Communication Media in the Software Requirements Negotiation Process

This paper presents an empirical study in the requirements negotiation process. In particular, the study compares traditional face-to-face meeting and distributed Communication by using two rich synchronous communication media (i.e., an enhanced chat, and a three-dimensional virtual environment). We have observed that there is a difference in the time taken to negotiate software requirements in favor of face-to-face meeting. As the only assessment of the time could not be meaningful, we have also analyzed the quality of the structured description of the negotiated software requirements. We observed that the quality of the structured descriptions is not influenced by the used communication media.