Due to their unique characteristics, military domains contain various peculiarities that directly or indirectly and favourably or unfavourably impact the development of software products. Observations of systems development in the Brazilian Navy for many years have shown that systems are developed and delivered usually with many delays, and during development there are many changes to the requirements initially elicited. Since many authors in the software engineering literature agree that problems in requirements account for more than 70% of total system development failures, it seemed to be logical that any effort to solve the problems encountered in the military environment should start focusing on the requirements area. Currently several techniques and approaches already exist that support the execution of activities in this phase. With this abundance of techniques, it becomes a difficult task for the analysts to select the best technique in a given circumstance. To support the selection of these techniques, several frameworks were also created, each one guided by a respective group of influencing factors. This study examined, in a detailed manner, these techniques and frameworks, and noticed that there are still issues to be addressed to guide the selection of elicitation techniques, especially in a complex environment such as the military one. To elicit these issues an exploratory qualitative research was performed. The results showed that social issues rather than technical ones were the main concern in the domain under study. Issues such as hierarchy and high staff turnover interfere in the requirements process but are yet not addressed. The findings of the qualitative research are the first contribution of the thesis. Based on these results this research proposed a novel framework for requirements elicitation within the context of a military environment taking into account social and technical factors, which is the second contribution of the thesis. Such a framework was developed following Conflict Theory from sociology. This framework organized a selection of techniques based on possible solutions to conflicts. Finally, the solution was evaluated to assess its efficacy. This evaluation was based on qualitative and quantitative research. Based on the evaluation results the framework was updated.

Software development is notorious for failure, typically defined as over budget, late delivery and/or poor quality of new information systems (IS) on project completion. The consequences of such failure can be enormous, particularly financially. As such, there is consensus by practitioners and academics alike that this practice is unacceptable. Yet with a variety of accepted development methods and tools available for use by software developers and project managers, there is still no significant reduction in the size or frequency of failure reported. In an attempt to understand the conflicts which arise in the development environment in which developers and project managers must operate, the research area is the role and value of ethics in the development of managed software projects. A definition of ethics in this context was provided by the IEEE/ACM Code of Ethics. Research was additionally conducted to understand how other professions and business areas define and enforce ethics in their respective working environments. These were (UK) Law, Finance, Retail and, law practice in the European Union. Interpretive research was then conducted to enable software development practices to be understood from the view of developers and project managers in industry. Unethical practices were then identified in a large IT company based in west London via a single, six month in-depth case study, with the data collected analysed via a series of repertory grids. Analysis and triangulation of the data collected via interviews, document analysis and observations led to an improved understanding of the causes of the unethical practices found. Conclusions and recommendations are then provided relating to implications for (a) the company participating in the research, (b) the application of the IEEE/ACM Code in industry (c) theory for ethicists.