Engaging the Crowd of Stakeholders in Requirements Engineering via Gamification

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is a discipline that focuses on obtaining a specification for a system that fulfils the expectations of the stakeholders. Unfortunately, the current state of the practice reveals that only a few stakeholders are involved—mostly key clients and lead designers—while active stakeholders are not highly engaged. This lowers the chances of obtaining a system that fully fulfils the stakeholders’ wishes. Gamification is an opportunity to increase the engagement of stakeholders in RE by establishing feedback loops that reward the useful participants, i.e., those who provide valuable contributions (requirements) for the system being designed. The related trend of crowdsourcing can be employed to maximise the number of participating stakeholders, by making RE a participatory activity where current and prospective users, developers, clients and analysts are involved. This chapter introduces the Crowd-Centric Requirements Engineering (CCRE) method that guides software producing organisations (SPOs) by involving a crowd of engaged stakeholders in RE. CCRE uses the REfine tool, a gamified platform for eliciting and refining requirements. In addition to presenting the method and its application in a case study, we define research challenges for the field.