Repurposing requirements: Improving collaborative sense-making over the lifecycle

This paper suggests collaborative sense-making as a way to view the process toward creating mutually intelligible representations of requirements that can serve as bridges between different stakeholder communities over the software development lifecycle. In order to do this, we describe the types of obstacles that can impede representational literacy across communities of practice coming together in a design effort. We then offer representational morphing as a strategy for addressing these obstacles, and show how it has been implemented in an approach and hypermedia groupware environment in industry use named Project Compendium. We conclude by reflecting on the key features of the approach and collaborative tool support which point toward future development in support of representational morphing.