EliciNet: A social network for eliciting and improving software requirements in Global Software Development

Requirements elicitation is an essential process of Requirements Engineering which involves defining stakeholders’ preliminary requirements. This process becomes more critical when dealing with Global Software Development because it involves many stakeholders situated in different locations, leading to an increase in communication problems like cultural diversity, scheduling conflicts, or tacit knowledge, among others. With the aim of carrying out effective communication among stakeholders and reducing such communication problems, the EliciNet social network is proposed in this study to support the three activities of the elicitation process: (1) identifying the individual stakeholder or stakeholder classes, (2) eliciting stakeholder preliminary requirements from the identified stakeholders, and (3) integrating, refining, and organizing the collected information. Moreover, a case study was designed and conducted to empirically validate EliciNet in the context of a small-sized software organization and obtain data for assessing their positive influence when obtaining quality preliminary requirements. The obtained results demonstrate that among EliciNet users, there was greater diversity in the stakeholders identified, an increase in the quality of the elicited preliminary requirements, as well as a greater number of preliminary requirements.