Setting a foundation for collaborative scenario elicitation

Eliciting requirements from users remains a major challenge for systems developers. The Collaborative Software Engineering Methodology addresses this challenge by combining the use of scenarios with Group Support Systems (GSS) technologies. This paper reports results of an experiment conducted to analyze definition of those scenarios using a general-purpose GSS. Scenario quality and productivity were evaluated and then compared for three textual scenario formats. Results highlighted the productivity of the unstructured format as well as the scenario completeness problems of all formats. Recommendations for an iterative collaborative scenario process and a special-purpose GSS scenario tool were developed to address these problems.