Collaborative Requirements Elicitation in Facilitated Collaboration: Report from a Case Study

User requirements elicitation is a complex process that requires stakeholders in teams to collaborate, go through decision-making processes and, finally, to arrive at consensus. During the user requirements elicitation processes, stakeholders who have different backgrounds, view points and understandings, need to clarify, capture and uncover user requirements in an efficient and effective manner. Many industry experts have admitted that collaboration among stakeholders in a facilitated workshop, aimed at defining and articulating user requirements, is one of the most difficult tasks in software development. In this research we present a collaborative process for user requirements elicitation. We used the principles of the Collaboration Engineering (CE) to design the process, which consists of Think Lets, as process building blocks. We designed the process to predictably guide the stakeholders through decision-making processes in a collaborative manner. The process is evaluated in a case-study within an industrial IT firm in China.