Requirements Elicitation: Impacts of Gamification on Variety, Novelty, and Completeness

Abstract Elicitation of requirements is a critical step in any product development process. An effective elicitation process can lead to capturing more requirements with higher degrees of novelty, variety, and completeness. Current elicitation techniques such as questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, prototyping, and brainstorming often fail to keep the stakeholders and designers engaged and may face issues, such as lack of stakeholder involvement and poor communication and collaboration. Thus, these techniques become prone to capturing ambiguous or incomplete requirements or even missing some requirements. In recent years, the application of gamification (e.g., leveraging gaming features in non-gaming contexts to create engaging and interactive user experiences) has shown promising effects in improving the motivation and participation of users in different design activities. In this paper, we present the results of a preliminary study on the impacts of gamification features on requirements elicitation activity. An experiment was conducted using two versions of a survey to elicit requirements: (1) a gamified questionnaire and (2) a non-gamified, conventional questionnaire. In both surveys, the participants were asked to generate a list of requirements. The gathered sets of requirements were then analyzed using statistical methods and compared based on three metrics: completeness, variety, and novelty. Our findings suggest that gamification positively impacts participants’ engagement, leading to a greater number of requirements. The preliminary results indicate differences in all three metrics considered here. However, there is no statistical significance in these differences to have confidence in the made observations due to the small sample size. As an initial attempt to investigate the impacts of gamification and how they could be evaluated, our study develops a preliminary understanding of the effects of gamification on requirements elicitation.