Group Recommender User Interfaces for Improving Requirements Prioritization

Abstract

Requirements engineering is one of the most critical phases in the context of software development. Unclear textual specifications of requirements, hidden dependencies between requirements, and suboptimal prioritizations and release plans represent the major reasons for project delays and even cancellation. In this paper, we show how group recommender user interfaces can help to improve the quality of requirements engineering processes. To that end, we developed a novel group recommendation approach that focuses on the aspect of improving requirements prioritization by making preference elicitation processes more flexible as well as by introducing innovative user interfaces that foster information exchange among stakeholders. We conducted a large user study (N=313 participants) to evaluate our approach. The evaluation results indicate that argumentation-based user interfaces in a group setting trigger more rating and communication activity among the group members which significantly improves the quality of the prioritization process. Our main contributions are twofold: (1) more flexibility of the requirements evaluation by supporting the delegation of votes to experts and (2) an increased engagement of the stakeholders responsible for the requirements.