Stakeholder participation is a key success factor of Requirements Engineering (RE). Typically, the techniques used for identifying and involving stakeholders in RE assume that stakeholders can be identified among the members of the organizations involved when a software system is ordered, developed or maintained-and that these stakeholders can be told or even mandated to contribute. However, these assumptions no longer hold for many of today's software systems where significant stakeholders (in particular, end-users and people affected by a system) are outside organizational reach: They are neither known nor can they easily be identified in the involved organizations nor can they be told to participate in RE activities. We have developed the GARUSO approach to address this problem. It uses a strategy for identifying stakeholders outside organizational reach and a social media platform that applies gamification for motivating these stakeholders to participate in RE activities. In this article, we describe the GARUSO approach and report on its empirical evaluation. We found that the identification strategy attracted a crowd of stakeholders outside organizational reach to the GARUSO platform and motivated them to participate voluntarily in collaborative RE activities. From our findings, we derived a first set of design principles on how to involve stakeholders outside organizational reach in RE. Our work expands the body of knowledge on crowd RE regarding stakeholders outside organizational reach.
Involving stakeholders in requirements elicitation is a cornerstone of successful requirements engineering (RE). With the recent technological advances, the number of stakeholders of a system has significantly increased. Major stakeholders, end-users in particular, are increasingly difficult to reach, because they may be globally distributed and outside organizational reach, i.e., they are no members of the organizations that are involved in the development of a system. Online elicitation platforms allow to elicit requirements collaboratively from a large number of distributed stakeholders. However, such platforms are not sufficient for motivating stakeholders outside organizational reach to contribute voluntarily. Gamification is a potential means for creating and sustaining such motivation. However, there is little research on stakeholder engagement with gamification so far. Current approaches particularly do not consider that stakeholders learn during elicitation and that their motivational factors also change. In this paper, we address this gap with a motivation concept that is inspired by the theories of experiential learning and need satisfaction. Our contribution is threefold. First, we suggest how to characterize these stakeholders despite not knowing who they are. Second, we show the role of experiential learning and need satisfaction with respect to gamification in the context of requirements elicitation. Third, we present a three-dimensional concept of how to motivate these stakeholders towards requirements elicitation over the whole period of requirements elicitation.
Prioritizing requirements is a crucial ingredient of successful Requirements Engineering (RE). The popular prioritization techniques assume that stakeholders are known and can be mandated to contribute to the prioritization process. This prerequisite no longer holds for many of today's systems where significant stakeholders (end-users, in particular) are outside organizational reach: they are neither known nor can they be identified among the members of the involved organizations. Classic techniques for involving these stakeholders such as polls or questionnaires are neither interactive nor collaborative, which is detrimental for prioritization. Social media enable collaborative prioritization, but fall short in motivating stakeholders outside organizational reach to participate voluntarily. In this light, we are developing the Garuso platform, which combines social media with gamification for motivating stakeholders. While first approaches to employing gamification in RE are promising, research is still in its infancy. Especially, little is known about the influence of the gamification algorithms controlling single game elements on the stakeholders' activities. In this paper we report on a field experiment in which we investigated this influence with Garuso. We found statistically significant differences between different algorithms controlling single game elements on the contributions of stakeholders to the prioritization of requirements.
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