Empowering Requirements Elicitation Interviews with Vocal and Biofeedback Analysis

Interviews with stakeholders are the most commonly used elicitation technique, as they are considered one of the most effective ways to transfer knowledge between requirements analysts and customers. During these interviews, ambiguity is a major obstacle for knowledge transfer, as it can lead to incorrectly understood needs and domain aspects and may ultimately result in poorly defined requirements. To address this issue, previous work focused on how ambiguity is perceived on the analyst side, i.e., when the analyst perceives an expression of the customer as ambiguous. However, this work did not consider how ambiguity can affect customers, i.e., when questions from the analyst are perceived as ambiguous. Since customers are not in general trained to cope with ambiguity, it is important to provide analysts with techniques that can help them to identify these situations. To support the analysts in this task, we propose to explore the relation between a perceived ambiguity on the customer side, and changes in the voice and bio parameters of that customer. To realize our idea, we plan to (1) study how changes in the voice and bio parameters can be correlated to the levels of stress, confusion, and uncertainty of an interviewee and, ultimately, to ambiguity and (2) investigate the application of modern voice analyzers and wristbands in the context of customer-analyst interviews. To show the feasibility of the idea, in this paper we present the result of our first step in this direction: an overview of different voice analyzers and wristbands that can collect bio parameters and their application in similar contexts. Moreover, we propose a plan to carry our research out.