Design of a Hyper Media Tool to support Requirements Elicitation Meetings

In this paper, we introduce a hyper media tool for requirements elicitation meetings. We consider requirements elicitation meetings as a consensus making process among participants who have their own roles. Participants in the meeting usually repeat the following activities to finish the final specification; • Preparing agenda and/or final specification for the next meeting while referring both his memory and secretary’s minutes if accessible. • Pursuing the arguments in a meeting while referring either the agenda for the meeting or minutes and his memory about the previous meetings. From the observation of several real meetings, most of the final specifications were inconsistent, and the unnecessary and redundant communication had occurred in the meetings because a large amount of verbal data in the meetings makes each participant’s memory and meetings’ minutes, incomplete and ambiguous. From this point of view, our tool gives the participants the following three facilities to reduce them; 1. The plain record of the meetings. 2. The repository for minutes and agenda extracted from the record. 3. The multi-modal and graphical user interfaces for referring the repository. Such facilities can avail for the participants to develop both suitable minutes and agenda. Our tool will improve the efficiency of a consensus making process by suppressing the unnecessary and redundant communication.