Be Ahead of the Game: Gamification for Inclusive RE

Requirement Engineering (RE) research has evolved in the last decades, addressing new challenges emerging from advanced software development methodologies, and from extending the user population to special groups of users. Although more and more products are developed for special needs user groups, only few research works address the unique challenges of eliciting requirements for users with whom such collaboration requires overcoming substantial barriers. In parallel, the use of gamification techniques has been investigated for the purpose of enhancing RE task performance, typically not addressing special user groups. In this paper, we focus on using gamification for RE tasks, intended for three special user groups: young children, individuals on the spectrum of autism, and elderly adults. We propose a model representing cognitive barriers hindering the RE process with the aforementioned groups of users, and set the ground for a research agenda which addresses these barriers of communication and engagement, by exploring gamification as a facilitator of inclusive RE.