Community driven elicitation of requirements with entertaining social software

Abstract

With the new business models of the Web 2.0 the need for continuous requirements engineering becomes even more important. Future applications are in 'perpetual beta' and well-understood user needs are a competitive advantage in a billion dollar market. However, user communities have to be addressed with new Web 2.0 style elicitation tools, since support by communities is offered at will in the most cases. In this paper, we research community-driven elicitation processes and their tool support. Identification of user needs with and without proposed Web 2.0 style elicitation processes are modeled explicitly using the strategic modeling approach i*. In a case study we implemented a Bubble Annotation Tool (BAT) for enjoyable, intuitive and traceable interaction within communities performing requirements engineering processes. First experiences with the tool in a study conducted to elicit requirements for an iPhone application are reported and discussed.