Requirements Elicitation in International Research Projects

The elicitation of end-user requirements is primarily focusing on the industry, where companies endeavor to discover and satisfy their customer’s requirements. Increasingly however, companies which are working in the same or in different fields are getting together, in order to do joint research and development, despite the fact that they may be potential competitors. These kinds of projects have varying motivations, are often supported by governmental incentives, and participated by academic partners and other for-profit, as well as non-profit organizations. These projects also have to deal with the elicitation of end-user requirements. Current processes however, are not able to take the special characteristics, presented by such project consortia, into account. In this paper we are evaluating the suitability of the wide-audience requirements engineering method, with its new and unique characteristics, for the requirements elicitation process in such international research projects.