Requirements engineering is perceived as one of software development's most vital but complex activities. Despite considerable advances, many software products continue to fail to fulfil their users' needs. A multi-stakeholder environment with several groups of users and developers additionally exacerbates known challenges in requirements elicitation. Following principles of action research, we investigate how practices of design thinking as an established approach to human-centred innovation may overcome or at least attenuate challenges of requirements elicitation in a multi-stakeholder environment. By observing and modelling the current requirements elicitation process of a multi-stakeholder app development project of an international OEM, we identified several challenges, for example, related to arbitrary prioritisation of requirements. Integrating our empirical observations of the requirements elicitation process with extant knowledge of design thinking, we propose a new requirements engineering process to address the challenges we identified. An evaluation of Infused Design thinking within the new process in the app development project supports the expectation of improved outcomes. As a key benefit, we observed improvements in the understanding of user needs in the engineering and development teams when harnessing the new process. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for both research and practice.
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Requirements engineering is perceived as one of software development's most vital but complex activities. Despite considerable advances, many software products continue to fail to fulfil their users' needs. A multi-stakeholder environment with several groups of users and developers additionally exacerbates known challenges in requirements elicitation. Following principles of action research, we investigate how practices of design thinking as an established approach to human-centred innovation ma...
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