When users become collaborators

Current requirements engineering practices for gathering user input are characterized by a number of communication gaps between users and engineers, which might lead to wrong requirements. The problem situations and context which underlie user input are either gathered back in time, or submitted with wrong a level of details. We think that making user input a first order concern of both software processes and software systems harbours many innovation opportunities. We propose and discuss a continuous and context-aware approach for communicating user input to engineering teams and other users, by a) instrumenting the problem domain, b) proactively recommending to share feedback and c) annotating graphical interfaces.