Constructing user requirements: a social process for a social context

We discuss our approach to constructing user requirements whereby users build requirements models themselves. The approach, termed user-led requirements construction (ULRC), is a social process that addresses a major problem: the user-developer culture gap. An important feature of the approach is that we have conducted, with users, an interpretivist empirical evaluation study of its constituent event flow diagram (EFD) modelling method and associated training. The ULRC has also been used in a live environment. The results are that users regard the EFD as effective for the requirements process, the EFD may be used for further studies to deepen our knowledge of the requirements process and the results contribute towards a set of public results for general evaluation and improvement.