Context

There are several methods to elicit requirements through interviews between an end-user and a team of software developers. The choice of the best method in this context is usually on subjective developers’ preferences instead of objective reasons. There is a lack of empirical evaluations of methods to elicit requirements that help developers to choose the most suitable one.

Objective

This paper designs and conducts a family of experiments to compare three methods to elicit requirements: Unstructured Interviews, where there is no specific protocol or artifacts; Joint Application Design (JAD), where each member of the development team has a specific role; Paper Prototyping, where developers contrast the requirements with the end-user through prototypes.

Method

The experiment is a between-subjects design with next response variables: number of requirements, time, diversity, completeness, quality and performance. The experiment consists of a maximum of 4 rounds of interviews between students that play the role of developers and an instructor that plays the role of client. Subjects had to elaborate a requirements specification document as results of the interviews. We recruited 167 subjects in 4 replications in 3 years. Subjects were gathered in development teams of 6 developers at most, and each team was an experimental unit.

Results

We found some significant differences. Paper Prototyping yields the best results to elicit as many requirements as possible, JAD requires the highest time to report the requirements and the least overlapping, and Unstructured Interviews yields the highest overlapping and the lowest time to report the requirements.

Conclusions

Paper Prototyping is the most suitable for eliciting functional requirements, JAD is the most suitable for non-functional requirements and to avoid overlapping, Unstructured Interviews is the fastest but with poor quality in the results.

中文翻译：

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基于访谈的需求启发方法：一系列实验

语境

有几种方法可以通过最终用户与软件开发人员团队之间的访谈来得出需求。在这种情况下，最佳方法的选择通常取决于主观开发人员的偏好，而不是客观原因。缺乏对方法的经验评估，以得出有助于开发人员选择最合适方法的需求。

目的

本文设计并进行了一系列实验，比较了三种方法来得出需求：非结构化面试，没有特定的协议或工件；联合应用程序设计（JAD），其中开发团队的每个成员都扮演特定角色；纸质原型，开发人员通过原型与最终用户对比需求。

方法

该实验是受试者之间的设计，具有下一个响应变量：需求数量，时间，多样性，完整性，质量和性能。该实验最多由4名学生之间的访谈组成，这些学生分别扮演开发者的角色和一名指导客户的角色。受试者必须详细拟定一份需求规格说明文件，作为访谈的结果。我们在3年内分4次重复招募了167名受试者。主题聚集在最多由6个开发人员组成的开发团队中，每个团队都是一个实验单位。

结果

我们发现了一些显着差异。纸样制作可产生最好的结果，以引起尽可能多的需求，JAD所需的时间最多，报告需求最少，重叠最少，而非结构化面试的重叠时间最多，报表需求最少。

结论

纸张原型最适合于提出功能性要求，JAD最适合于非功能性要求并避免重叠，非结构化面试最快，但结果质量较差。