Req-Rec: Enhancing Requirements Elicitation for Increasing Stakeholder's Satisfaction Using a Collaborative Filtering Based Recommender System

TL;DR

This paper introduces Req-Rec, a hybrid recommender system that improves requirements elicitation by increasing stakeholder satisfaction through personalized requirement recommendations, addressing limitations of traditional techniques.

Contribution

It presents a novel hybrid recommender system combining collaborative filtering and repertory grid techniques to enhance requirement elicitation effectiveness.

Findings

Overcomes time and location limitations of traditional methods

Increases stakeholder awareness of project requirements

Improves requirement elicitation efficiency

Abstract

The success or failure of a project is highly related to recognizing the right stakeholders and accurately finding and discovering their requirements. However, choosing the proper elicitation technique was always a considerable challenge for efficient requirement engineering. As a consequence of the swift improvement of digital technologies since the past decade, recommender systems have become an efficient channel for making a deeply personalized interactive communication with stakeholders. In this research, a new method, called the Req-Rec (Requirements Recommender), is proposed. It is a hybrid recommender system based on the collaborative filtering approach and the repertory grid technique as the core component. The primary goal of Req-Rec is to increase stakeholder satisfaction by assisting them in the requirement elicitation phase. Based on the results, the method efficiently could overcome weaknesses of common requirement elicitation techniques, such as time limitation, location-based restrictions, and bias in requirements' elicitation process. Therefore, recommending related requirements assists stakeholders in becoming more aware of different aspects of the project.