Challenges of Requirements Communication and Digital Assets Verification in Infrastructure Projects

• Context: In infrastructure projects with design-build contracts, the supplier delivers digital assets (e.g., 2D or 3Dmodels) as a part of the design deliverable. These digital assets should align with the customer requirements. Poorrequirements communication between the customer and the supplier is one of the reasons for project overrun. To thebest of our knowledge, no study have yet investigated challenges in requirements communication in the customer-supplierinterface.Objective: In this article, we investigated the processes of requirements validation, requirements communication, anddigital assets verification, and explored the challenges associated with these processes.Methods: We conducted two exploratory case studies. We interviewed ten experts working with digital assets fromthree companies working on two infrastructure projects (road and railway).Results: We illustrate the activities, stakeholders, and artifacts involved in requirements communication, requirementsvalidation, and digital asset verification. Furthermore, we identified 14 challenges (in four clusters: requirements quality,trace links, common requirements engineering (RE), and project management) and their causes and consequences inthose processes.Conclusion: Communication between the client and supplier in sub-contracted work in infrastructure projects is oftenindirect. This puts pressure on the quality of the tender documents (mainly requirements documents) that provides themeans for communication and controls the design verification processes. Hence, it is crucial to ensure the quality of therequirements documents by implementing quality assurance techniques

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Infrastructure

requirements

digital assets

verification

validation.

Programvaruteknik

Software Engineering

Systemteknik

Systems Engineering

Publication and Content Type

vet (subject category)

ovr (subject category)