In a requirements capturing meeting, the chair plays an important role. The chair presides the meeting and captures requirements. Roughly speaking, the process of requirements capture has two steps. In the first step, the chair extracts the clients' ideas as many as possible. In the second step, the chair integrates these ideas and captures requirements. The first step is indispensable in order to capture requirements through the second step.
In such a requirements capturing meeting, it is empirically known that the chair presides the meeting chiming in moderately in order to extract the clients' ideas. However, the relationship between chiming-in and the number of ideas is not known. We conducted an experiment to examine it.
The participants in the experiment were sixteen students (S1,..., S16) and one teacher (T), and each set of subjects consisted of two students (Si, Sj) and the teacher (T). We had eight subject-sets. Before the experiment, the two students in each subject-set were supposed to decide the theme they would talk about; and, to have thought about the contents of their talk. In the experiment, they were supposed to talk about the theme to the teacher. For the half of eight subject-sets (called “Many Group”), the teacher chimed in as many as possible in a natural way. For the other half (called “Few Group”), the teacher chimed in only when the utterance terminated. The conversation was recorded with a tape-recorder, and transcribed to count the number of ideas.
The number of ideas had a statistical tendency to be larger in the Many Group than in the Few Group. In addition, the ideas from the Many Group had a stastistical tendency to be more well-formed than those from the Few Group.
Our experimental finding is that the chair in a requirements capturing meeting should chime in moderately to get more ideas, and more well-formed ideas.
