When the Developers Become the (Micro) Crowd: An Educational Case Study on Multidisciplinary Requirements Engineering

This paper presents an academic educational case of the ‘Jam week’ at Shenkar College of Engineering Design and Art. During the 2021 Jam week – a four days’ hackathon-like course – 700 students working in teams addressed challenges related to loneliness, as defined by five social care organizations. The event was virtually held through an online collaborative whiteboard platform (Miro) and Zoom meetings. The design thinking (DT) methodology was followed, involving multidisciplinary teams of engineering and design students, who collaboratively proposed solutions presented with conceptual videos and posters. Each social organization was allocated with several teams that addressed its challenges, considered in our context as a micro-crowd (MC). We performed a study for examining the influence of the collaborative environment on the MCs’ requirements engineering (RE) activities, and specifically how the structured online boards facilitate the DT process. Following a qualitative analysis of the shared boards, our findings indicate the ways in which the shared collaborative tool and the multidisciplinary nature of the MCs contributed to the high-quality outcomes developed by the teams. We further propose the concept of parallel MC-based RE referring to teams of multidisciplinary developers working in parallel for developing many ideas in a timely and creative manner.