Distributed and Collaborative Requirements Elicitation Based on Social Intelligence

Requirements is the formal expression of user's needs. Also, requirements elicitation is the process of activity focusing on requirements collection. Traditional acquisition methods, such as interview, observation and prototype, are unsuited for the service-oriented software development featuring in the distributed stakeholders, collective intelligence and behavioral emergence. In this paper, a collaborative requirements elicitation approach based on social intelligence for networked software is put forward, and requirements-semantics concept is defined as the formal requirements description generated by collective participation. Furthermore, semantic wikis technology is chosen as requirements authoring platform to adapt the distributed and collaborative features. Faced to the wide-area distributed Internet, it combines with the Web 2.0 and the semantic web to revise the experts requirements-semantics model through the social classification. At the same time, instantiation of requirements model is finished with semantic tagging and validation. Apart from the traditional documentary specification, requirements-semantics artifacts will be exported from the elicitation process to the subsequent software production process, i.e. services aggregation and services resource customization. Experiment and prototype have proved the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.