Involvement of Users in Software Requirement Engineering

User involvement is an important component in the development of effective software engineering system. This paper focuses on a study to draw the facts and to establish the involvement of users in influencing the software requirement practitioners and the system as a whole. It also analyses the effects of different characteristics of the users in the requirement process. Twenty-two software practitioners working in different software multinational companies across the world were involved in the survey. In addition to this eight software practitioners working in three companies were interviewed through Internet chatting. The analysis of the results of interviews and a survey showed that requirement differs when the users are from different educational backgrounds and geographical locations. It also showed that documenting user´s requirement improves the system considerably, but as the number of user requirements increase substantially, the customer-user differences also increases proportionately.