Reducing Ambiguity in Requirements Elicitation via Gamification
Hafsa Shareef Dar
Abstract
The overall quality and success of software highly depends on the involvement of stakeholders. Requirements elicitation supports RE analyst to gather requirements from the stakeholders based on their needs. There are multiple elicitation techniques present in literature and used by the practitioners. Some of them are questionnaires, interviews, prototyping, and user stories etc. However, these techniques are based on textual representation of requirements. These techniques are quite common among the requirement engineers yet problems of ambiguity, inconsistency, incompleteness still exist mostly due to their textual nature and lack of stakeholder involvement. Lack of clarity about the system increases the ambiguity of what exactly are the system requirements. Since elicitation is carried at an early stage of development the users are not sure of what they want, as requirements tend to evolve with the help of discussions and interactions among various stakeholders and technical team. Furthermore, the conventional elicitation methods are limited when it comes to stakeholders' participation and involvement, thus leaving a space for more ambiguous and incomplete requirements. In this work, Gamification, a game-based context will be used in non-gaming context for user involvement in fun ways. During elicitation, gamification would help to involve and interact with the stakeholders, with an intention to develop their interest in eliciting and finalizing system requirements. The goal of this paper is to reduce ambiguity during requirements elicitation. This would help in reducing the cost and time of development. Furthermore, we will elicit software requirements using gamification by developing a gamification tool with a focus to elicit unambiguous requirements by ensuring users' participation and maintaining interest. The validation of tool would be done using multiple confirmatory case studies from software industry.