A collaborative method for business process oriented requirements acquisition and refining

Requirements Elicitation (RE) is a critical process in system/software engineering. Its goal is to capture the stakeholders’ expectations, needs and constraints, which can be elicited, analyzed and specified as requirements. Gathering the requirements correctly, clearly and completely in a natural way is a typical challenging problem, because requirements analysts always play key roles in the elicitation process dominantly while stakeholders participate in passively. In this paper, we propose a collective intelligence driven business process oriented requirements acquisition and refining method. Its aim is to reduce the requirements analysts’ dominance and promote stakeholders’ self-expression and self-improvement to elicit requirements clearly and completely. It adopts the group storytelling method to promote the collaboration and communication among stakeholders, utilizes the narrative network model to enhance the associations among story fragments, and introduces dialogue game theory to guide the progressive refining. At the same time, the activity theory is adopted as the description framework to present the method and an application example is introduced. Finally, a pilot experiment is carried out to evaluate its perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use; and the actual quality of the requirements based on the degree of completeness and understandability in comparison with JAD. The results show that the requirements elicited by BPCRAR are more complete and understandable than JAD. In addition, the BPCRAR is perceived usefulness and ease of use in the experiment.