Design of a hyper media tool to support requirements elicitation meetings

Introduces a hypermedia tool for requirements elicitation meetings. We consider such a meeting to be a consensus-making process among the participants, who have their own roles. Participants in the meeting usually repeat the following activities to reach the final specification: (a) preparing the agenda and/or final specification for the next meeting while referring both to their own memory and the secretary's minutes, if accessible; and (b) pursuing the arguments in a meeting while referring either to the agenda for the meeting or to the minutes and their own memory about previous meetings. From observations of several real meetings, most of the final specifications were inconsistent, and unnecessary and redundant communication had occurred in the meetings because a large amount of verbal data in the meetings made each participant's memory and meeting minutes incomplete and ambiguous. From this point of view, our tool gives the participants the following facilities: (1) a plain record of the meetings; (2) a repository for the minutes and agenda extracted from the record; and (3) multi-modal and graphical user interfaces for referring to the repository. Such facilities can be available for the participants to develop both suitable minutes and agendas. Our tool improves the efficiency of a consensus-making process by suppressing unnecessary and redundant communication.<<ETX>>