Requirements elicitation and refinement in collaborative research projects

Abstract

Summary European Union (EU) projects are means of the European Commission for funding research activities. Such projects address challenging research objectives by involving both academic and industrial partners, from several countries. Information and communication technologies–related projects often undertake to deliver a software system prototype. In such a context, most of the typical issues of global requirements engineering may emerge. Partners can have different background and expertise, needs are not sharply defined, and communication is hampered by linguistic and cultural differences. If these issues are not carefully taken into account from the beginning, problems frequently emerge during project execution. This paper presents the experience of applying a customized elicitation and refinement approach in the context of the Learn PAd EU project, which involved about 50 people. The approach combines collaborative elicitation and wiki‐based refinement sessions to come to a set of consolidated requirements. Lessons learnt are discussed as a guidance for researchers dealing with analogous issues in similar contexts. Some of the major observations refer to the importance of initial face‐to‐face meetings when combined with asynchronous remote interactions; the role of moderators that have to encourage collaboration and foster a shared understanding; and the definition of guidelines to select wiki‐based platforms.

Selection of goals with incomplete linguistic preference relations

“…Different techniques have been proposed to elicit the need of the stakeholders; and also to identify the software requirements of an information system (IS), for example, elicitation based on behavioural data (Liu et al, 2017), elicitation based on goal concepts (Sadiq and Jain, 2015), etc. These techniques are used to find out the list of the software requirements so that the end product which is developed on these requirements can satisfy the customers and end users (Angelis et al, 2018). Agrawal et al (2019) explored the e-service quality and its relations with customer satisfaction in the field of banking.…”

Técnicas de elicitação de requisitos no desenvolvimento de software: uma revisão sistemática da literatura

“…h) Workshop. É uma técnica colaborativa para definir os requisitos de um software e pode ser utilizado para esclarecer ambiguidades (Angelis, Ferrari, Gnesi, & Polini, 2018;Mishra, Aydin, Mishra, & Ostrovska, 2018). Ele é uma espécie de seminário ou grupo de discussão em que um palestrante apresenta um conteúdo específico e incentiva a reflexão no grupo.…”

Process-oriented knowledge management and learning in public administrations

“…With respect to the barriers: lack of personnel due to turnover, and lack of regulatory policy framework, Section 1 include them among the main goals motivating our research. Finally, Learn PAd also mitigates some technical barriers discussed in Stoffregen et al (2015) and De Angelis et al (2018) thanks to the sustainability of the technological artefacts. The proposed prototype released by the EU project relies on open-source software projects with quite active and mature communities (i.e., XWiki -https://www.xwiki.org, ATL and Acceleo -https://eclipse.…”