A Measurement Framework for Team Level Assessment of Innovation Capability in Early Requirements Engineering

In English When developing software-intensive products for a market-place it is important for a development organisation to create innovative features for coming releases in order to achieve advantage over competitors. This paper focuses on assessment of innovation capability at team level in relation to the requirements engineering that is taking place before the actual product development projects are decided, when new business models, technology opportunities and intellectual property rights are created and investigated through e.g. prototyping and concept development. The result is a measurement framework focusing on four areas: innovation elicitation, selection, impact and ways-of-working. For each area, candidate measurements were derived from interviews to be used as inspiration in the development of a tailored measurement program. The framework is based on interviews with participants of a software team with specific innovation responsibilities and validated through cross-case analysis and feedback from practitioners.