Application of Design Thinking for Elicitation Requirements in Mobile Applications

Abstract

In the context of software development methodologies, activities and requirements elicitation practices adopted by organizations present challenges regarding the definition and understanding of system requirements and in relation to communication between the project team and stakeholders. Requirements elicitation is the process through which analysts determine stakeholders software requirements. Requirements elicitation is seldom well done, and an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of user requirements has led to the downfall of many software projects. The Design Thinking methodology has been used by organizations as a requirement elicitation technique for making use of the immersion procedure that, as a consequence, brings the team stakeholder closer to the software project and allows the creation of projects with a design that is closer to the end user and with higher quality, minimizing the problems in requirements elicitation. This work evaluates the elicitation process of software requirements of the mobile applications developed in a Brazilian Public Agency, from the use of the concepts and procedures recommended by Design Thinking (DT). Furthermore, a practical case study is presented in which the use of DT is used in eliciting requirements of developed applications. The development process phases adopted by the Agency were also compared with the phases of the model adopted by DT. The comparative study demonstrated that the traditional methodology adopted today is bureaucratic and difficult the creation process, as well as the interaction between stakeholders and members of the development team and the knowledge transfer.