Influence of Context on Decision Making during Requirements Elicitation

TL;DR

This paper empirically investigates how contextual factors influence stakeholder decision making and communication during requirements elicitation, aiming to improve understanding and support for engineers in gathering system needs.

Contribution

It introduces a framework categorizing contextual factors affecting decision making in requirements elicitation, validated through empirical studies inspired by AI research.

Findings

Contextual factors significantly influence stakeholder communication.

A structured framework helps engineers understand decision influences.

Empirical validation supports the framework's applicability.

Abstract

Requirements engineers should strive to get a better insight into decision making processes. During elicitation of requirements, decision making influences how stakeholders communicate with engineers, thereby affecting the engineers' understanding of requirements for the future information system. Empirical studies issued from Artificial Intelligence offer an adequate groundwork to understand how decision making is influenced by some particular contextual factors. However, no research has gone into the validation of such empirical studies in the process of collecting needs of the future system's users. As an answer, the paper empirically studies factors, initially identified by AI literature, that influence decision making and communication during requirements elicitation. We argue that the context's structure of the decision should be considered as a cornerstone to adequately study how stakeholders decide to communicate or not a requirement. The paper proposes a context framework to categorize former factors into specific families, and support the engineers during the elicitation process.