Improving the Requirement Elicitation Process using Empathy Maps and Personas: A Quasi-Experiment

Abstract

There is a growing interest in the use of Design Thinking (DT) to enrich re-quirements elicitation processes. This fact motivated us to explore the use of the Brainstorming technique, usually used alone for requirements elicitation, in combination with user-centered and empathy-oriented techniques taken from the DT process. Specifically, we carried out a quasi-experiment to com-pare the Effectiveness of Brainstorming sessions in terms of the number of ideas of requirements generated, and also the Identified Stakeholders, com-plementing the Brainstorming sessions with two of the most widely used DT techniques: Empathy Maps and Personas. Therefore, we consider three treatments: Personas + Brainstorming, Empathy Maps + Brainstorming, and Brainstorming alone (control group). The quasi-experiment was carried out with 74 students enrolled in the Bachelor of Computer Engineering course at the Universitat Politècnica de València in 2021. The results reveal a statisti-cally significant effect on Identified Stakeholders when using Empathy Maps. Descriptive analysis shows also an increase in Identified Stakeholders when using Personas, and in the Effectiveness of Brainstorming sessions when used together with Empathy Maps or Personas. There is also a variation in the type of ideas, with the number of functional ideas being higher, and that of non-functional ideas being lower when Empathy Maps are used. These re-sults seem to indicate that Brainstorming sessions are improved when com-plemented with Empathy Maps or personas techniques. However, we still do not have enough evidence to recommend either Personas or Empathy Maps. Therefore, further experimentations will be needed to obtain more conclu-sive results considering some improvements that are discussed in the paper.