On the usage of context for requirements elicitation: End-user involvement in IT ecosystems

Today´s systems are faced with the need of constant evolution to remain competitive, especially when looking at IT Ecosystems and their growing number of subsystems. As a prerequisite for these to stay competitive, system providers need a clear understanding of their stakeholder´s needs. As systems tend to be increasingly complex nowadays, support an increasingly number of stakeholders, have a shorter release cycles to evolve and need to adapt to the environment and the users, some of the standard requirements elicitation techniques tend not to be suitable any more. Especially when adaptivity is necessary, system providers need to understand the context, in which the systems are used, but also the context of users for the adaptation. In this paper I concentrate on the largest stakeholder group, namely the end-users for requirements elicitation. Evaluation criteria include (i) support of context, (ii) scalability to large numbers of end-users, and (iii) scalability to large numbers of end-user´s needs and problems that lead to new requirements. My literature review suggests that this important field is currently underrepresented in Requirements Engineering research. This research proposes to develop a framework that explains the different context types and their role for requirements elicitation. The framework is then used to investigate existing requirements elicitation techniques and their potential for considering context. It is also used to show how emerging techniques can further support requirements elicitation with context.