Higher Quality Requirements: Supporting Joint Application Development with the Nominal Group Technique

Miscommunication among systems developers and users has plagued systems requirements determination under conventional approaches and has contributed to several systems failures. Joint Application Development (JAD) was introduced to alleviate this problem by bringing together developers, users, and managers in face-to-face workshops designed to produce higher quality requirements. However, JAD sessions are conducted under the freely interacting group structure, which makes them susceptible to many of the classical problems commonly encountered during group deliberations. In this paper we present a case for integrating JAD and the nominal group technique (NGT), a group protocol that was designed to solve problems similar to those encountered in JAD. We tested our proposition in a laboratory experiment consisting of 24 group sessions, in which professional JAD facilitators led a diverse group of business professionals, managers, and advanced business students in specifying high-level requirements (under JAD and with the integrated techniques) for a simulated IS problem. The neutral and objective measures of their effects on the quality of the resulting requirements indicate that the combination of these group process structures seems to neutralize the negative impacts of group dynamics often experienced in JAD sessions, and contributes to improvements in the quality of the requirements.