Gamifying requirement elicitation: Practical implications and outcomes in improving stakeholders collaboration☆
Introduction
Today we live in an Information Age where people rely on computers and technology to work, socialize or live [1], [2]. This technology quite often comes to us through Information Systems. Building such systems is usually a complex and difficult task, demanding a significant effort on planning and managing their development process. Therefore, system designers and developers use the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) framework which breaks down the development process into a pipeline of activities. Several SDLC models have been created (waterfall, fountain, rapid prototyping, incremental, etc.) but all of them have the requirements elicitation activity as the earliest stage in the pipeline. Before requirements can be analyzed, modeled, or specified they must be gathered through an elicitation process. The aim here is to understand and define how the system will operate [4]. Requirements elicitation is based on an intense communication between stakeholders and between stakeholders and analysts. Therefore, cooperation and collaboration are vital in this process [5]. 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. Several studies have been conducted with the goal of edifying common limitations in this process, mainly aiming at understanding the role of communication, collaboration and cooperation between stakeholders. Nevertheless, despite of the research efforts, it still remains unclear how to overcome limitations that can account for 60–70% of projects that fail to deliver on time, on cost and with the scope originally promised [3], costing around 80–100 times more if discovered at the implementation stage and are very hard to fix [4].
Since communication is critical, requirement elicitation tools must ease this communication between stakeholders in order to articulate their needs collaboratively, allowing their meetings even at a different time and place to discuss those needs. In this context, game-based tools can bring numerous benefits to this process since they typically provide immediate feedback, active participation and the high motivation promoted by the competitive environment [5], [6], [7].
Recent research as proved the benefits of adding game mechanics to common tasks outside the traditional video games environments [8], including motivational benefits to participate in online communities. This approach is commonly referred in the literature as “gamification”, a concept that is already used in numerous applications ranging across productivity, finance, health, education, sustainability, as well as news and entertainment media [9].
The paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness and acceptance of iThink system [13], a RE 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. The evaluation was based on Action Research in real world organizations: Action Research allowed us contributing with practical actions on the organization and generating knowledge about its context on the real world situations. We performed two Action Research cycles: we studied the problematic situation of the first environment, applied an action, evaluated the results and extracted lessons learnt. In the second cycle we also studied the situation taking into account the lessons learnt from the first cycle, applied an action with iThink, evaluated the results and extracted other lessons [10], [11].
Section snippets
Requirements elicitation
As stated by Avison and Fitzgerald [4], “the definition of requirements can be problematic, but in relation to information systems, it can be said to be everything that the set of relevant stakeholders want from a system”. Requirements are, indeed, the key information in Information Systems Development: they translate stakeholders’ needs, determining what and how the Information System will operate [12], [13].
Despite many years of computing and research efforts in the requirements elicitation
Gamification
Serious games and virtual-based environments are an important response from the technologist to the “digital natives” [36], [37], a generation who were raised on interactive games and expect the same kind of interactive experiences in every information system. Indeed, it may not be entirely correct to call the use of serious games a novelty, since by nature young children begin to gain interest in several topics through games during their earlier years [38].
The field of business is not an
Requirements elicitation with visualization techniques
Before our game-based studies, our previous web-based Focus Groups [23], [24] were successful on eliciting requirements from distant stakeholders. Those Focus Groups promoted discussion towards relevant issues in order to formalize requirements for an outdated Information System. Moreover, all stakeholders could participate in this discussion and not only key stakeholders, which allowed being more confident on the results. Nevertheless, the participation rate was not satisfactory. Therefore, we
iThink
iThink is a web-based gamified environment designed for supporting collaborative requirement elicitation. By combining several game mechanics with the use of a creative thinking technique, called “The Six Thinking Hats” [62], it attempts to tackle the collaboration and user involvement problems previously described. iThink presents to the user, the requirement elicitation process as a game, through which the player is rewarded not only by the generations of new requirements, but also by the
Case studies
iThink is a web-based gamified environment designed for supporting collaborative requirement elicitation. By combining several game mechanics with the use of a creative thinking technique, called “The Six Thinking Hats” [62], it attempts to tackle the collaboration and user involvement problems previously described. iThink presents to the user, the requirement elicitation process as a game, through which the player is rewarded not only by the generations of new requirements, but also by the
Results
In order to obtain some feedback on the game and on the information that resulted from the game two different questionnaires were made, the first was directed to the players and the second was aimed at the project manager.
Discussion
iThink emerged from our previous studies [66], [67]. These studies advanced with requirements elicitation challenges, namely stakeholders’ difficulties articulating and recognizing own needs; stakeholders’ conflicts of interests; and analysts’ misinterpretations. Beginning with a regular Focus Group to better elicit requirements, we then moved to web based Focus Groups. With these studies, we identified a number of techniques and features that should be part of the discussion to ease
Limitations
Our research is a qualitative research and, therefore, it lacks statistical significance, hypotheses, a control group, of systematic choice of subjects, experts and projects. Actually, we followed triangulation to validate our qualitative research. Therefore, we used two sources of studies of the same phenomenon to evaluate different data and environments. The different data concern different stakeholders and different research topics. The different environment concern different locations of
Conclusion
This paper presents two case studies aimed at evaluating a requirement elicitation tool based on gamification concepts and the Six Thinking Hats method. These case studies were successful in promoting discussion of stakeholders towards requirements. Consequently, several requirements were orderly elicited as well as arguments that support and refute those requirements. Moreover, the results demonstrate a good number of contributions and that this approach may enhance the user involvement in
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (INESC-ID multiannual funding) under the project PEst-OE/EEI/LA0021/2013. The authors also would like to acknowledge to the European funded Project Games and Learning Alliance (FP7 258169) the Network of Excellence (NoE) on Serious Games.
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This paper has been recommended for acceptance by Matthias Rauterberg.