Context Factors : What they are and why they matter for Requirements Problems

When eliciting requirements, it is important to understand why some information may remain implicit, while other are shared by stakeholders. This requires knowing which variables influence if an individual shares implicit information during requirements elicitation. Based on our past experimental work on decision-making, we identify variables – Context Factors (CFs) – which influence whether implicit information is shared, and we define a procedure to validate CFs. Our contribution is that we present and define a set of CFs, we define an experimental procedure to validate CFs, and we discuss how the understanding of CFs helps identify information that can remain implicit during elicitation, and can thereby help to increase the completeness of requirements. We relate CFs to the common Requirements Problem concept, and we highlight the main limitation of our results.