Aligning the Requirements Engineering Process with the Maturity of Markets and Products

This paper describes the product life cycle and its implications for the requirements engineering process, and proposes a research agenda for increasing the understanding of market and product maturity implications on requirements engineering. A product life cycle comprises four stages of maturity: Introduction, Growth, Maturity and Decline. All products go through these four stages of maturity during its lifetime, and we believe it is necessary to take the maturity into account when deciding on requirements engineering issues. User behaviour differs between the stages, the organisation goes through drastic changes and the product itself evolves. Thus, these characteristics force different demands on the requirements engineering process, and this position paper suggests strategies for requirements engineering in the different stages