Collaborative Requirements Elicitation in Facilitated Collaboration: Report from Two Contexts

Requirements elicitation is a complex process that requires stakeholders in teams to collaborate, go through decision-making processes to arrive at consensus. During the requirements elicitation processes, stakeholders who have different backgrounds, view points and understandings, need to clarify, capture and uncover user/client requirements in an efficient and effective manner. However, there is lack of research shows that one requirements elicitation method could be transferred and valid in different contexts. In this research we have designed a collaborative process for user requirements elicitation. We used the principles of the Collaboration Engineering (CE) to design the process, which consists of ThinkLets, as process building blocks. We designed the process to predictably guide the stakeholders through decision-making processes in a collaborative manner. The process is evaluated in three IT and three management consultancy industries cases in China. We have found the collaborative process is useful in two contexts and also find some successful key elements in these two contexts.