Child's play: using techniques developed to elicit requirements from children with adults

Tools and techniques for requirements elicitation are generally unsuitable for use with children and for innovative and futuristic developments. Using case studies, the paper explores practical methods to get requirements for future technologies from children. Techniques such as scenario building, role playing and storyboarding proved successful in involving children in the requirements process and stimulating innovation. The paper looks at how these methods can be adopted to take a more fundamental approach to requirements elicitation for adults. These techniques help requirements engineers face the difficult task of getting system requirements from users of whatever age, ability or background. They also enable requirements engineers to anticipate some of the future changes that might occur before or as a consequence of the installation of a new system. The lack of specialist notation was found to promote communication throughout the analysis and design process and gives the designers a context in which to design.