Investigation for synergy Effects and Preconditions in merging Quality Assurance-Systems: Shown on the Example of Software Requirements Management

Abschlussarbeit, die am 21.05.2001 erfolgreich an einer Fachhochschule in Deutschland eingereicht wurde. Abstract: This exam elaboration is about merging scenarios as they are found in the situation of a company merger or an acquisition. Its intention is to give a broad overview of the variety of different sights, perspectives and point-of-views appearing in such a scenario. As far as I have found out, there are quite a lot of mergers on the one hand, but nobody knows how to do a merger on the other hand. Concretely, there are pretty few guidelines, general recommendations, or even how-to's dealing with mergers. And there is no agreement among experts whether postmerger effects like "synergy" may be expected or not. So I tried to collect as much information as possible about this subject. The intention is to fill the gap of information and provide a "first approach" to merging scenarios for those who need to deal with this. Experts often differ in their opinions, but sometimes they share a certain point of view or even their complete expertise. Both different and shared opinions are pointed out in this elaboration. Later, the findings are concretely combined with the results from requirements investigations with the purpose to prescribe a better approach to mergers. This improved approach results from the risk analyzing activities as postulated by the Evolutionary Spiral Process (=: ESP) and the perspective to knowledge management (=: KM) integraton as synergy effect, devoted to the merger process itself. In case integration succeeds across disciplines (including quality assurance (=: QA), KM, and so on), the synergy exploitation is even higher. Table of Contents: (a)|Abstract|2 (b)|Declaration|3 (c)|Words of thanks|4 (d)|ToC|5 (e)|Images & Tables|7 1.|Introduction|9 1.1|Personal Motivation|9 1.2|Integration|10 2.|Overview|12 2.1|Structure|12 2.2|Terms and definitions|14 2.3|Merger and acquisition|15 3.|Integration|20