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Contribution Details

Type Dissertation
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title GARUSO: stakeholder participation beyond organizational limits
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Martina Kolpondinos
Supervisors
  • Martin Glinz
  • Lorenz Hilty
  • Birgit Penzenstadler
Language
  • English
Institution University of Zurich
Faculty Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics
Number of Pages 322
Date 2018
Abstract Text Stakeholder participation is a cornerstone of effective Requirements Engineering (RE). It supports the development and evolution of software systems so that they fit their intended purpose within their application domain. To enable successful stakeholder participation RE experts have created a broad variety of approaches for different circumstances and project phases. These approaches focus on traditionally dedicated software systems, which have closed and location-bound user groups. The stakeholders of these systems usually are members of the organizations that commission or build the system. Meanwhile, technological development has opened doors for ubiquitously deployed and openly available software systems. Stakeholders of these systems are rarely members of those organizations. Instead, they are so-called outside organizational reach and typically unknown to RE experts. Hence, in contrast to stakeholders of traditionally dedicated software systems, they can neither straightforwardly be identified nor be requested to participate in RE. Moreover, they are likely location-independent, numerous and highly heterogeneous. Current RE approaches do not suffice to address these challenges. Established RE approaches provide limited means to identify stake- holders outside organizational reach, let alone motivate them to voluntarily participate in RE. They also cannot support collaboration in distributed settings or on a large scale, yet, collaboration is known to be essential for the development of novel systems and in unknown domains. Feedback mechanisms and social network sites enable distributed and large-scale collaboration. However, their effectiveness is limited as they originally have no RE purpose and typically are restricted to their members. Latest RE approaches close this gap and also apply motivation strategies, which, however, are simplified, missing the high heterogeneity of stakeholders out- side organizational reach; thus, risking to demotivate them. This thesis presents the GARUSO (Game-based Requirements Elicitation) approach, a novel RE approach specifically designed for stakeholders outside organizational reach. It provides (1) a strategy to identify them and (2) a social media based platform that enables their collaborative participation in RE and applies gamification to motivate them to do so. The GARUSO platform is the core of the thesis. Its conceptual solution is inspired by the structure of user stories, the experiential learning theory, motivational psychology and game design. As a proof of concept, it was implemented to elicit and prioritize requirements and evaluated in a field study with promising results: The identified stakeholders build a highly heterogeneous crowd which participated - over a period of three months - in platform activities. They perceived the platform easy to understand, interesting to use and during their participation increased their knowledge on the application domain of the software system of interest.
Other Identification Number merlin-id:17331
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