Engineering a method for wide audience requirements elicitation and integrating it to software development

Consumer oriented information systems development has become increasingly important matter, as more and more complex information systems are targeted towards consumer markets. We argue that developing IS for non-organizational users creates new problems, which IS and requirement engineering (RE) community should attend to. First of all, the elicitation of requirements becomes more difficult as usually consumers do not explicitly know what they want, and it is difficult for them to express their ideas. To support different views of product development, such as project management and design, the method should present requirements in a 'rich enough' way to avoid overloading management, but in the same time giving designers the detailed information they need. Last but not the least, the results of requirements engineering should be easy to integrate to the software development process. To this end, we have constructed a new RE method and its support environment within Metaedit+ Meta CASE tool. We based our method on critical success chains (CSC) method, which supports top-down approach for planning, but also provides for wide participation of IS customers to get rich information. CSC aggregates the results of many individual interviews into meaningful graphical models of what is critically important about a potential system. In our work, CSC is extended with customer segmentation and lead user concepts from marketing.