Assessing the Effects of Facilitated Workshops in Requirements Engineering

The role of facilitated workshops in the development of information systems is widely acknowledged, but apart from some anecdotic evidence little objective information about the effectiveness of facilitated workshops is available. This paper describes a study within a single organization in which the effectiveness of requirements engineering in projects using facilitated workshops is compared with the effectiveness of past projects that used one-on-one interviews to gather requirements instead of facilitated workshops. In the study the duration, effort and satisfaction of 49 DSDM projects using facilitated workshops have been compared with 20 projects that used the Method/1 method, which use one-on-one interviews to gather the requirements. For small projects, Method/1’s one-on-one interviews are found to be more efficient, whereas for larger projects the efficiency of one-one-one interviews is surpassed by DSDM’s facilitated workshops. Other quantitative effects were not found, and subjective ratings of stakeholders do not indicate a preference for DSDM projects either. We conjecture that these findings may be partly due to the fact that we only measured short-term effects (such as customer satisfaction immediately after a project is completed), and that the true benefits of facilitated workshops could require longitudinal studies.