Evaluating the BPCRAR Method: A Collaborative Method for Business Process Oriented Requirements Acquisition and Refining

The goal of requirements elicitation is to understand the stakeholders’ needs and constraints, and form the system requirements. But gathering requirements correctly, completely and understandably in a natural way is a great challenge to traditional methods, for requirements analysts always play key roles in the elicitation process dominantly while stakeholders participate in passively. Therefore, strategies that help the identification of requirements based on reducing the requirements analysts’ dominance and promoting stake-holders’ self-expression and self-improvement are welcomed. This paper reports a controlled experiment to evaluate the Business Process oriented Collaborative Requirements Acquisition and Refining (BPCRAR) method. Compared to JAD, the statistical results show that the requirements elicited by BPCRAR are more complete and understandable. Besides that, the perceived usefulness, ease to learn, and ease of use of BPCRAR are all confirmed by the statistical data got from the questionnaire to the participants.

[1]  Olivia R. Liu Sheng,et al.  Examining the Technology Acceptance Model Using Physician Acceptance of Telemedicine Technology , 1999, J. Manag. Inf. Syst..

[2]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  Theory-W Software Project Management: Principles and Examples , 1989, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[3]  Jane Cleland-Huang,et al.  Enhancing Stakeholder Profiles to Improve Recommendations in Online Requirements Elicitation , 2009, 2009 17th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference.

[4]  Barry W. Boehm,et al.  EasyWinWin: a groupware-supported methodology for requirements negotiation , 2001, ESEC/FSE-9.

[5]  Neil A. M. Maiden,et al.  End-user requirements blogging with iRequire , 2010, 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering.

[6]  Brad McKenna,et al.  Experiencing the Elicitation of User Requirements and Recording them in Use Case Diagrams through Role-Play , 2011, J. Inf. Syst. Educ..

[7]  Brian Henderson-Sellers,et al.  The object-oriented systems life cycle , 1990, CACM.

[8]  Massimiliano Di Penta,et al.  An experimental investigation of formality in UML-based development , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[9]  Tore Dybå,et al.  Challenges and Recommendations When Increasing the Realism of Controlled Software Engineering Experiments , 2003, ESERNET.

[10]  Andrew Ravenscroft,et al.  Designing interaction as a dialogue game : Linking social and conceptual dimensions of the learning process , 2006 .

[11]  Gruia-Catalin Roman,et al.  Advanced Software Engineering: Expanding the Frontiers of Software Technology: IFIP 19th World Computer Congress, First International Workshop on Advanced ... Federation for Information Processing) , 2006 .

[12]  Rong Peng,et al.  DRE-specific Wikis for Distributed Requirements Engineering: A Review , 2012, 2012 19th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference.

[13]  Fred D. Davis.  Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology , 1989, MIS Q..

[14]  Jeffrey O. Grady.  System requirements analysis , 1993 .

[15]  Alistair Sutcliffe,et al.  User-Centred Requirements Engineering , 2002 .

[16]  Evan W. Duggan,et al.  Higher Quality Requirements: Supporting Joint Application Development with the Nominal Group Technique , 2003, Inf. Technol. Manag..

[17]  Khaled El Emam,et al.  An instrument for measuring the success of the requirements engineering process in information systems development , 2004, Empirical Software Engineering.

[18]  K. Kuutti.  Activity theory as a potential framework for human-computer interaction research , 1995 .

[19]  Martha S. Feldman,et al.  Narrative Networks: Patterns of Technology and Organization , 2007, Organ. Sci..

[20]  Daniele Quercia,et al.  StakeSource: harnessing the power of crowdsourcing and social networks in stakeholder analysis , 2010, 2010 ACM/IEEE 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering.

[21]  Andrea Herrmann,et al.  Using Storytelling to record requirements: Elements for an effective requirements elicitation approach , 2011, 2011 Fourth International Workshop on Multimedia and Enjoyable Requirements Engineering (MERE'11).

[22]  Andrew Gemino,et al.  A framework for empirical evaluation of conceptual modeling techniques , 2004, Requirements Engineering.

[23]  Didar Zowghi,et al.  Requirements Elicitation: A Survey of Techniques, Approaches, and Tools , 2005 .

[24]  Claes Wohlin,et al.  Experimentation in Software Engineering , 2012, Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

[25]  Tore Dybå,et al.  A systematic review of statistical power in software engineering experiments , 2006, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[26]  Mariëlle den Hengst,et al.  Assessing the Quality of Collaborative Processes , 2006, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06).

[27]  Michael Geisser,et al.  A Method for Collaborative Requirements Elicitation and Decision-Supported Requirements Analysis , 2006, IFIP Workshop on Advanced Software Engineering.

[28]  Reidar Conradi,et al.  Empirical Methods and Studies in Software Engineering , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[29]  Marcos R. S. Borges,et al.  Athena: A collaborative approach to requirements elicitation , 2009, Comput. Ind..

[30]  Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten,et al.  Collaborative Requirements Elicitation: A Process-Centred Approach , 2014 .

[31]  Davi Viana,et al.  Evaluating the REMO-EKD technique: A technique for the elicitation of software requirements based on EKD organizational models , 2013, 2013 3rd International Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE).