48 PART | II ITS users
There are several benefits when using JAD for eliciting requirements, which
include:
• Customer involvement and interaction with stakeholders from the very first
steps, reduces delays due to disagreements and accelerates the development
life cycle.
• The technique gives value to user feedback, which is part of the collabora-
tive process.
• The collaboration increases satisfaction of users, and
• Promotes the communication between analysts and stakeholders.
The drawbacks of the technique can be:• Waste of resources and time due to bad planning.
• Need for trained experts that will facilitate the collaborative process.
• Need for careful planning and additional effort to stay on plan.
• Increased costs for running the sessions.
- Prototyping
The prototyping technique relies on an initial version of the product,
which is rapidly launched for creating an idea of the final product and col-
lecting user requirements. In an iterative process, the prototype is repeatedly
refined, based on the user feedback. The technique can be used when the
stakeholder requirements are not known in advance and an early feedback
is needed (Davis, 1992). The rapid prototyping and visualization of the final
software can help users to early identify the true requirements without being
aware of the application or being domain experts. The advantages of proto-
typing are:
• Reduced cost and shorter development life cycle.
• Early detection of system problems and further reduction of the develop-
ment cost (Fu, Bastani, & Yen, 2011).
Despite the benefits, there are several disadvantages such as (Mc Clendon,
Regot, & Akers, 1996):
• Lack of a concrete mechanism for tracing requirements life-cycle.
• The tendency to reuse existing code fragments may keep problematic or
bad-quality code until the final system version.
• It can be time consuming, especially for complex systems that require mul-
tiple refinement iterations.
• The resistance of users to change, in combination with the multiple system
versions.
Prototyping is usually combined with other elicitation techniques, such as
the collaborative JAD or the traditional interviews.