REfine: A gamified platform for participatory requirements engineering

Abstract

The active involvement of stakeholders in Requirements Engineering (RE) is crucial, for the system under design should fulfill their expectations. In software products, which evolve under the control of Software Product Organizations (SPOs), stakeholders' involvement is limited to SPO represen- tatives and key clients. Thus, key stakeholders are excluded, including current and prospective users. Two emerging trends can help to shift towards a more participatory RE: crowdsourc- ing eases the access to a large number of stakeholders, and gamification provides means to keep them motivated through feedback loops (that reward the useful participants). In this paper, we build on this potential and propose REfine, a gamified online platform for requirements elicitation and refinement by involving a crowd of stakeholders: users, developers, analysts, etc. We report encouraging results from a case study that show how REfine has led to useful requirements, stakeholders' engagement, and valuable interactions.