Improving the Communication Skills of IS Developers during Requirements Elicitation using Experiential Learning

Journal of Information Systems Education, Fall 2009 by Qurban, Mustafa H, Austria, Richmond D

ABSTRACT

The improvement of communication skills among Information Systems (IS) developers can be considered as a strategy to mitigate the risk of project failure during IS design. This paper addresses issues on various communication barriers normally encountered during its requirements elicitation (RE) stage. This study aims to adopt experiential learning as a method to improve the communication skills of IS developers during RE techniques such as prototype presentations. As such, an educational multimedia, which teaches communication skill enhancement among professionals during presentations, served as an interventional tool for experiential learning. Using a longitudinal quasi-experiment, the developers' self-assessments of their communication skills during prototype presentations at pre- and post-intervention were compared and analyzed using the WordStat� software. Responses showed significant improvements on the presentation skills especially on keywords-in-context related to the audience, information, interest, prototype, room, summary, and talk. This signifies the influence of such learning method to the developers at post-intervention. Further, the study implies that experiential learning can be empirically supported to effectively motivate IS developers in improving their presentation skills after receiving a learning intervention. Thus, experiential learning can be used by project managers as an effective training strategy to improve the communication skills of their IS developers in preparation to current and future projects on IS design especially during prototype presentations of the RE stage.

Keywords: Agile Software Development, Information Systems Development, Requirements Elicitation, Experiential Learning, Project Management

INTRODUCTION

Many failures in the development of Information (IS) are reported to be attributed to several factors such incomplete requirements specification, lack of development methodology, poor design, and non-existence of information architecture (Ramani et al., 2006; Feghali and Zbib, 2007). practices in systems development have addressed issues through the creation of the Agile Manifesto covers better ways of developing software. In brief, manifesto tackles basic principles and agile methods software development which puts high priority on the through effective communication. It also adheres to principle that the most effective way of information is through face-to-face conversation and Jeffries, 2004). As such, Requirements Elicitation could be seen as the stage where the communication is relatively intensive (Coughlan and Macredie, 2002; Coughlan et al., 2003). With this, RE represents foundation of a shared understanding between and users about a proposed system which is necessary to achieve project success (Al-Ani, 2002). The most notable of these problems in IS design is the existence of communication barriers during RE (Coughlan et al., 2003; Coughlan and Macredie, 2002).

Agile software development practitioners consider communication barriers such as socio-cultural and language differences among stakeholders as a global challenge (Holmstrom et al., 2006; Lindstrom and Jeffries, 2004). As such, ineffective communication skills among system developers may lead to miscommunication that contributes to the inability to gather complete requirements (Thanasankit and Corbitt, 1999; Qurban, 2008). Correspondingly, ineffectual communication during RE is considered to be one of the most critical factors in the failure of IS projects (Coughlan and Macredie, 2002; Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000). Also, many obstacles such as complex and changing requirements as well as the various levels of interactions between users and developers hinder the successful communication during the RE phase (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000; Valenti et al., 1998). Hence, project managers hand�ng multiple IS design initiatives should strategically supervise the efficiency of their developers in communicating with the users during RE.

In a study, most IT projects are more likely to be unsuccessful; where only about one out of five IT projects is likely to bring full satisfaction. Also, the larger the project is, the more likely the failure would be. Moreover, it is estimated that nearly 40% of these projects would fail to achieve their business case within one year of implementation (Nauman et al., 2005; Heeks, 2002). Since RE is largely about communication, techniques relevant to understanding requirements remain to be valuable for project success especially during elicitation techniques such as prototyping (Nuseibeh and Easterbrook, 2000). Correspondingly, the need to improve the communication among stakeholders in systems design is evident among various researches (Urquhart, 2001; Coiera et al., 2002). As such, the communication techniques play a central part during RE to manage time and cost of an IS design project (Sindre, 2005; Majchrzak et al., 2005). Similarly, improving the communication process through skill enhancement is essential during RE management (Coughlan et al., 2003).