CrowdRE in a Governmental Setting: Lessons from Two Case Studies

Abstract

Crowd-based Requirements Engineering, or CrowdRE, is a recent paradigm that promotes the active participation of a large number of stakeholders in RE. In CrowdRE, requirements elicitation can be crowdsourced by creating an online platform that allows stakeholders to formulate ideas regarding the specific product. Although some case studies on crowd-based elicitation exist, no conclusive evidence can be derived on the effectiveness of such techniques. In this paper, we study crowd-based elicitation within a large governmental organization. We conduct two case studies of CrowdRE within the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee. For this, we construct the KMar-Crowd method, which adapts CrowdRE ideas to the needs of governmental organizations. While one case compares the crowd-generated ideas with requirements elicited via interviews and similar techniques, the other measures the usefulness of the gathered ideas for a product for which no prior elicitation was conducted. The results of the case studies, which attracted larger crowds than in previous studies, indicate that CrowdRE can be successfully applied to engage the users of a software product in requirements elicitation. Contradicting earlier studies, the inclusion of gamification elements in the CrowdRE method did not increase the motivation to participate, possibly due to the nature of governmental organizations.