An empirical assessment of the use of different communication modes for requirement elicitation and negotiation using students as a subject

Requirements engineering is considered the most communication-intensive activity among all other software engineering activities. Requirements´ elicitation and negotiation are communication-rich stages that require intensive contact between different stakeholders (i.e., clients and engineers). For this reason, the need to identify the appropriate task/technology fits, to support the communication between different stakeholders, plays a key role in an efficient software products´ development. This work reports an empirical study that assesses the use of three different communication modes, namely: Text-Based Communication, Face-to-Face, and Rich Media, in order to support the different tasks of requirements elicitation and negotiation, by using students as the study subjects. We conducted an experimental study of six groups of students, who were developing a requirements document, over a period of eight weeks. Each communication mode was used by two different groups. We evaluated the three communication modes in terms of the participants´ satisfaction with performance, comfort with the communication mode, and the perceived engagement level, using post questionnaires. The main finding of this study is that the face-to-face communication mode was the most preferred method during both the elicitation and negotiation stages, in comparison to the text-based and rich media modes.