On eliciting requirements from end-users in the ICT4D domain

Currently, there is much interest in harnessing the potential of new and affordable Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as mobile phones, to assist in reducing disparities in socioeconomic conditions throughout the world. Such efforts have come to be known as ICT for Development or ICT4D. Although this field of research holds much promise, few projects have managed to achieve long-term sustained success. Among the many reasons for this, from a software engineering perspective, in many cases, it can be attributed to inadequacies in gathering and defining software requirements. Incomplete software requirements and the consequent failures in creating sustainable systems arise because of inadequate consideration of the high-level social development goals, neglect of environmental constraints and/or a lack of adequate input from end-users regarding their specific needs and socio-cultural context. We propose enhancements to the requirements elicitation methodology specifically adapted to address these shortcomings. Our approach incorporates the novel technique of Structured Digital Storytelling to elicit input from end-users who have limited literacy and applies a conceptual model derived from Communications Theory to analyse the constraints that arise from their socio-cultural context. The needs, goals and constraints thus identified are integrated using a goal-based analysis to produce a more informed understanding of the potential areas of technology intervention and the needed software requirements. We illustrate our approach and validate its effectiveness with a field study.