Gamifying requirement elicitation: Practical implications and outcomes in improving stakeholders collaboration

• The paper aims to evaluate effectiveness, acceptance of collaborative.
• Two field studies showed a successful discussion of stakeholders towards requirements.
• The use of Six Thinking Hats method aided guiding stakeholders’ discussion towards relevant perspectives of elicited requirement.
• In the field studies, project managers reported high degree of satisfaction on amount and quality of generated requirements.
• The amount of valid requirements and requirements feedback was reported to be similar or better than using traditional tools.

The requirements engineering process is a key phase of the Information System development since it determines its functionalities and its operation. Before requirements can be analyzed, modeled, or specified they must be gathered through an elicitation process. Requirements elicitation is non-trivial because you can never be sure you get all requirements from the user or stakeholder by just asking them what the system should do. Requirements elicitation practices include interviews, questionnaires, user observation, workshops, brainstorming, use cases, role playing and prototyping. However, these common procedures are still prone to be ambiguous or incorrect which can lead the Information Systems to failure. It is consensual that one of the major problem of this activity relates to the communication and collaboration between different and distant stakeholders. Thus, recent studies have been proposing web collaborative tools to gather these stakeholders in order to elicit requirements. The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness and acceptance of such a collaborative tool which was developed by using a gamification approach and the Six Thinking Hats method. The document also makes a discussion of the implication and outcomes of improving stakeholders collaboration.