Athena: A collaborative approach to requirements elicitation

The quality of the requirements is crucial for a project's success. Requirements elicitation, however, is not an easy task. Viewpoint, mental model and expectation differences among users and analysts make this task hard and conflicting. In many cases, the clients are not completely sure about their real needs. In others, the current work process does not correspond to management expectations. In this paper, we try to overcome these problems by presenting Athena, an approach founded on collective knowledge to progressively build the system requirements from a narrative of user stories to the definition of use cases. Athena is a collaborative approach to elicit requirements. It is based on group storytelling, where stakeholders tell stories about current and past systems that support a given activity. The stories are merged to form a single story. Stories are then transformed into scenarios, and from scenarios to use cases. Our solution consists of a knowledge model based on stories about the system, a collective construction method, and a tool to support interactions. We have conducted experimental analyses to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.