Towards Understanding Software Requirements Capture: Experiences of Professional Students using the NIA to Support the Win-Win Spiral Model
Peter K. Oriogun · Innovation in Teaching and Learning in Information and Computer Sciences · 2002
This paper presents a critical appraisal of the Win-Win Spiral model as a possible process model for developing small-scale software from inception to implementation within a semester framework at higher education institutions. It also presents the Negotiated Incremental Architecture (NIA) and its decision rationale, developed at the University of North London as being a possible architecture that supports the Win-Win Spiral model with respect to developing software within higher education institutions over a semester time frame. A group of mature students undertook a coursework, which involved implementing a reasonably straightforward web-based application using the Win-Win Spiral model [Citation1, 2]. The task was to produce an on-line golf league system where players could input match results and view their league rankings on the web. The coursework was a requirement for the module ‘Software Engineering’ on the postgraduate masters programme at the University of North London, during semester A of 2001/2002 academic session. Having used the Win-Win Spiral model, we consider the model to be too heavy on documentation and will propose to support the on-going research at the University of North London, to develop a collaborative model, which is an adaptive hybrid of the Win-Win Spiral and the Incremental Development. This proposed Negotiated Incremental Model [Citation3, 4, 5] will prove to be attainable within a semester framework as well as realistic to implement in industry.