Supporting Informal Meetings

Requirements engineering is communication intensive. It requires the collaboration of many stakeholders representing different positions. The early stages of requirements are characterized by many informal interactions, often face-to-face, whose aim is to clarify, brainstorm, or negotiate requirements. Misunderstandings and mistakes introduced during requirements are costly, as they impact all other phases of software development. Hence, it is essential to support communication during requirements engineering. While much research has been done to support negotiation during requirements, much less attention has been paid to brainstorming and informal meetings. Such informal interactions, however chaotic and unstructured, are essential to the early phases of requirements as they are key to clarifying misunderstandings and reaching consensus on terms and solutions. In this paper, we describe features of iBistro, an experimental environment for capturing informal meetings using contextaware devices, structuring the meeting minutes using a rationale-based approach, and retrieving the minutes during subsequent informal meetings. In developing iBistro, our goal is to interfere as little as possible with the informal meeting while improving the coverage and the quality of the knowledge captured. We conclude by describing our experimental plans for evaluating iBistro and dealing with usability issues such as training and user acceptance.