Meeting the Demands of Wide- Audience End Users

Abstract

This chapter identifies seven problems associated with requirements elicitation, where the intended users are external to the firm; it proposes characteristics for requirements elicitation methods to resolve the problems and tells the story of a new method that supports the resolution of six of the seven problems. Diverse, external users with little relationship to the organization present special problems for requirements elicitation. We identify seven problems for requirements elicitation with wide audience end users (WAEU): context, reach, modeling, model aggregation, presentation, consensus building, and the requirements-design interface. We also identify seven characteristics for requirements elicitation methods to support solutions for these problems. We develop the critical success chains (CSC) method to support six of the seven characteristics and demonstrate its use to develop applications for mobile financial services at Digia, Inc, a Helsinki-based software development firm. Current research efforts are addressing the seventh problem.