Radboud University Liquid Requirements Engineering

In this case study, an e-democracy approach called liquid democracy is applied for gathering feedback from a large group of software end-users. Liquid democracy aims to leverage the scalability of decision processes to a crowd of people. The outcomes gave an indication of the added value of liquid democracy techniques for gathering end-user requirements. Traditional requirements engineering approaches such as interviews and workshops only gather requirements based on a small group of users. When eliciting requirements from a few users, lots of needs are not recognized and a user-centered prioritization of requirements is difficult. A liquid democracy tool was used on a small scale. Interviews were conducted to investigate the added value of this technique for requirements practitioners. In addition, they were used to discover potentials and areas of concern of applying liquid democracy techniques in the field of requirements engineering. The main liquid democracy property was not used by the users of the liquid democracy tool. The general potential of inspiration for key stakeholders have been confirmed by most of the requirements practitioners. This research confirmed, albeit not decisively, that online requirements gathering adds value to requirements engineering processes. However, liquid democracy techniques probably did not influence the result. For using a liquid democracy tool in requirements engineering, at least the areas of concern encountered in this study need to be addressed.