Integrated scenario and process modeling support for collaborative requirements elicitation

Abstract

Information systems development research has documented the importance and the difficulty of eliciting requirements from users. Research on the use of Group Support Systems (GSS) for requirements elicitation led to development of the Collaborative Software Engineering Methodology (CSEM) and identified the need for collaborative methods and tools to provide a dynamic picture of the business processes that a system must support. Recent research suggests that scenarios can fill this need. A review of the scenario literature showed that although there is widespread agreement on the usefulness of scenarios, there are many questions on how to implement a user-focused, scenario-based systems development process. The purpose of this research was to advance understanding in this area and to determine: What are the collaborative modeling processes, tools, and facilitation techniques needed to effectively elicit scenarios from users in a group environment? A two-phase, multi-method systems development research approach was used. The first phase focused on use of a general-purpose GSS for collaborative scenario elicitation. A conceptual framework and initial methodology were developed and then evaluated during exploratory case studies and a laboratory experiment. The second phase focused on development and evaluation of a special-purpose GSS and methodology. Phase I results showed that: users can easily define scenarios which provide rich pictures of the problem domain; an iterative, collaborative methodology with scenario and action prompts is needed to ensure scenario completeness; and limitations of general-purpose GSS negatively impacted productivity. The Collaborative Distributed Scenario and Process Analyzer (SPA) provides integrated textual scenario and graphical process modeling capabilities which successfully overcame these limitations. This research made several contributions. CSEM was extended to define scenario usage opportunities throughout development. Scenario content, form, group process and facilitation techniques were defined for collaborative scenario elicitation using a general-purpose GSS, which can be used now by practitioners. A special-purpose GSS tool (SPA) was developed and integrated into a comprehensive methodology which allows user groups to rapidly define and analyze scenarios in face-to-face and distributed settings. Finally, flexibility designed into SPA opens up opportunities for many other uses for SPA and serves as a first-step towards a build-your-own GSS tool.