An empirical evaluation of requirement engineering techniques for collaborative systems

A collaborative system is a distributed software which allows several users to work together and carry out collaboration, communication and coordination tasks. To perform these tasks, the users have to be aware of other user's actions, usually by means of a set of awareness techniques. When we are defining a collaborative system, the awareness techniques can be considered as non-functional requirements bounded to some quality factors, such as usability. However, serious flaws can be found during the specification of these systems if we use the usual Requirement Engineering techniques available, because their expressiveness limitations when dealing with non-functional requirements. In this paper an empirical evaluation is introduced to determine if these techniques are really appropriate to model groupware requirements and which is the best approach to specify this kind of systems. With this aim, a collaborative text editor is used to evaluate whether the current techniques for Requirement Engineering are appropriated or not, exploiting the relation between awareness capabilities and standard quality factors.