Eliciting user requirements for e-collaboration systems: a proposal for a multi-perspective modeling approach

E-collaboration systems have become a new way of doing business that supports and enables communication, coordination and cooperation between people in shared projects and so on. Yet, eliciting user requirements for e-collaboration systems has proved to be a great challenge, due to the need to capture different knowledge for many different types of stakeholder. This paper proposes an approach for eliciting user requirements for e-collaboration systems. This approach takes a scenario description of e-collaboration systems as input and transforms it into a rich set of four-perspective requirement models, namely Coordination Model, Communication Model, Connection Model, and Collaboration Model. These models, respectively, represent the coordination, communication, connection, and collaboration characteristics of e-collaboration systems. Collectively, these models aim to provide a more complete and accurate requirements specification. An example from a collaborative office system is used to illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach. This paper also discusses practical implications of the proposed approach and then provides an assessment for the proposed approach.