Requirements Elicitation With Focus Groups: Lessons Learnt
Carla Sofia e Sá Farinha, Miguel Mira da Silva · European Conference on Information Systems · 2013
Requirements are the heart of Information Systems Development. Therefore, requirements elicitation is a critical and crucial activity. Despite many years of researches towards this activity, requirements are still ill-defined, ambiguous or incorrect and condemn Information Systems to failure. A major problem is the complex communication between different communities. On the one hand, stakeholders do not always know what they want or have difficulties articulating their needs. On the other hand, analysts do not know business concepts and have difficulties understanding stakeholders’ needs. Our research used several extensions of Focus Groups to ease the communication between stakeholders and analysts. This paper describes field studies, using extended Focus Groups, to reduce the challenges of this communication and improve the requirements elicitation activity. From the empirical results, we present lessons learnt that consolidate knowledge and guide practitioners to a more efficient requirements elicitation. A major contribution of this paper is, therefore, the set of empirical studies which allowed us to take several conclusions that may help researchers and practitioners.