Automated Group Facilitation for Gathering Wide Audience End-User Requirements

The System development projects continue to fail at unacceptable rates. Including a wide array of users in the requirements development process for a wide-audience system can help to increase system success. Facilitated group workshops can effectively and efficiently gather requirements from several different users. To decrease cost and increase the number of potential workshop participants, we designed an embodied agent facilitator to guide groups through the facilitation process. We extend previous research which found human facilitated prompting to be effective at increasing the completeness of requirements gathered by replacing the facilitator with an avatar which administered the same prompts. We hypothesize that the avatar facilitated group will also have a significant increase in the quality and quantity of requirements gathered and find support for our hypothesis.