Bringing Developers and Users Closer Together: The OpenProposal Story

Even though end-user participation in requirements engineering (RE) is highly important, it is at present not frequently used. Reasons can be found in the large expenditure of time for organizing and carrying out surveys as well as in the time it takes to understand the users’ requirements. This research is supposed to address this problem by presenting the OpenProposal approach for distributed user participation using visual requirement specifications. First experiences made in several case studies show the potential and limits of this approach and outline the possibilities of application.