Research On The Collaborative Method For Business Process Oriented Requirements Acquisition And Refining

Requirements elicitation (RE) is the first step and one of the most important steps in requirements engineering. How to effectively promote users to participate in RE is a key challenge. Most existing RE methods are dominated by requirements analyst and participated by stakeholders passively. Research on how to switch the stakeholders from passive participation to positive participation is of great importance. In particular, methods for sufficient communication and knowledge transfer in the context of requirements engineering are promoted, and stakeholders'expressing requirements and requests with their own languages are supported. Besides, eliciting software requirements from the perspective of business process is advantageous to reflecting consistency between realistic business needs and stakeholders'expectations, which make the developed software meet the needs of corporate business better. Thus, how to effectively and efficiently establish business process models for eliciting needs from stakeholders is of great significance for accurately describing functional requirements of the system to be built. Finally, with the popularity of worldwide software development, it becomes more difficult to elicit requirements from stakeholders scattered overworld. How to utilize an appropreate tool to support distributed requirements elicitation by distributed software development team is also critical.This paper focuses on business process oriented requirements elicitation and refining with collective wisdom. Its objectives are reducing analyst's leading, promoting stakeholders'self-expression and self-perfection requirements and improving completeness, understandability, traceability and consistency of requirements.This paper proposed the collaborative requirements elicitation and refining methods under face-to-face environment and distributed environment by combining several interaction theory (group storytelling, dialogue game, narrative network analysis, semantic wiki techniques etc.), developed the prototype WikiBPCRAR and organized empirical studies to evaluate their usability, effectiveness and efficiency.The main body of this paper is shown as follows:(1) Proposed a Business Process oriented Collaborative Requirements Acquisition and Refining method (BPCRAR) of under face-to-face environmentBased on narration theory and dispute theory, this paper proposed the BPCRAR method by integrating group storytelling, dialogue game and narration network. BPCRAR supports expressing and refining business process requirements under face-to-face environment. Its operation runs as follows:participants narrate specific facts, vision and abnormality of the known business by telling story naturally, and obtain formal business process model by continuous abstracting, categorizing and dialog.(2) Organized a controlled experiment to validate the usability of the BPCRAR methodWe compared the BPCRAR method with the wellknown JAD method to test the usability of the BPCRAR method by organizing a controlled experiment. We collected assessments on perceiving usefulness, easeness to learn, and easeness of use on BPCRAR; and the completeness and understandability of artifacts elicited by BPCRAR and JAD were ratedby experts respectively. The experiment results show that, the BPCRAR method is useful, easy to learn and easy of use. Besides, from the perspective of artifacts'completeness and understandability, BPCRAR is superior to JAD.(3) Proposed the WikiBPCRAR method under distributed environmentWe synthesized the BPCRAR method and the semantic wiki technique as WikiBPCRAR to improve the availability of BPCRAR and support the distributed collaboration requirements elicitation and refining of business-oriented process. It includes requirements elicitation and refining framework and process.(4) Designed and implemented the prototype WikiBPCRARThe prototype fully utilized the semantic functions provided by Semantic MediaWiki and achieved a computer-aided group storytelling, collaborative business process element extraction, dialogue game, narrative network model automated conversion from text and graphics modeling based on informal BPMN. It can increase the collaboration efficiency among stakeholders in distributed environment and enhance the overall tracability of artifacts.(5) Organized a controlled experiment to compare WikiBPCRAR and BPCRARTo evaluate the two methods completely and accurately, we expanded relevant rating indicators:as for perception, questionnaire was designed complied with the expanded Davis's technique acceptance model to investigate easeness of use, usefulness and intended use in the future of WikiBPCRAR; meanwhile, expert scoring was used to evaluate the performance of artifacts elicited by WikiBPCRAR and BPCRAR in terms of completeness, understandability, tracability and consistency. The analysis results show that, WikiBPCRAR is more useful, ease of use and intended use in the future than BPCRAR; in terms of quality of artifacts elicited, WikiBPCRAR is superior to the BPCRAR in terms of completeness, understandability, traceability and consistency. Therefore, we infer that WikiBPCRAR effectively improves usability of BPCRAR.