Interview review: An empirical study on detecting ambiguities in requirements elicitation interviews

[Context and Motivation] Ambiguities identified during requirements elicitation interviews can be used by the requirements analyst as triggers for additional questions and, consequently, for disclosing further – possibly tacit – knowledge. Therefore, every unidentified ambiguity may be a missed opportunity to collect additional information. [Question/problem] Ambiguities are not always easy to recognize, especially during highly interactive activities such as requirements elicitation interviews. Moreover, since different persons can perceive ambiguous situations differently, the unique perspective of the analyst in the interview might not be enough to identify all ambiguities. [Principal idea/results] To maximize the number of ambiguities recognized in interviews, this paper proposes a protocol to conduct reviews of requirements elicitation interviews. In the proposed protocol, the interviews are audio recorded and the recordings are inspected by both the analyst who performed the interview and another reviewer. The idea is to use the identified cases of ambiguity to create questions for the follow-up interviews. Our empirical evaluation of this protocol involves 42 students from Kennesaw State University and University of Technology Sydney. The study shows that, during the review, the analyst and the other reviewer identify 68% of the total number of ambiguities discovered, while 32% were identified during the interviews. Furthermore, the ambiguities identified by analysts and other reviewers during the review significantly differ from each other. [Contribution] Our results indicate that interview reviews allow the identification of a considerable number of undetected ambiguities, and can potentially be highly beneficial to discover unexpressed information in future interviews.