A Method and Tool for Wide Audience Requirements Elicitation and Rapid Prototyping for Mobile Systems

Abstract

In recent years, consumer oriented information systems development has become increasingly important matter, as more and more complex information systems are targeted towards consumer markets. We argue that developing IS for non-organizational users creates new problems, which IS and requirement engineering (RE) community should attend to. First of all, the elicitation of requirements becomes more difficult as usually consumers do not explicitly know what they want, and it is difficult for them to express their ideas. To support different views of product development, project management and design, the method should present requirements in a ‘rich enough’ way to avoid overloading management, but in the same time giving designers the detailed information they need. Furthermore, to facilitate iterative requirements development the method should allow for rapid development of prototypes from designs. To support these goals we have constructed an enhanced requirements elicitation and mobile system construction method and its support environment within Metaedit+ Meta CASE tool. We based our method on Critical Success Chains (CSC) method, which supports top-down approach for planning, but also provides for wide participation of IS customers to get rich information. The high level results of CSC are turned into mobile applications running in Symbian platform by using a novel domain specific method that supports generation of executable environments from specifications.