Translating human values into requirements

Values influence the needs of stakeholders, they can directly affect requirements or can be unconscious desires for system behavior. Stakeholders have individual conceptions of values such as sustainability, fairness, or privacy. This clash leads to misunderstandings. In this paper, we explore the practical application of a recently published software process for eliciting human values from stakeholders and translating them into requirements. To avoid misunderstandings regarding the definition of values, this process uses Schwartz’s theory of basic human values. However, this value-based process had not been practically applied. We applied this process to the development of a group allocation system for capstone projects. We used surveys, interviews, and a workshop to elicit the relevant human values from two stakeholder groups: students and project organizers. Sets of human values were bundled into personas and prioritized by stakeholders of both groups in a follow-up workshop. Our own experience during the process and statistical analyses of the results revealed that not all elicitation techniques are equally suitable for determining the human values of end-users. The participants’ feedback was mostly positive. Based on our experience, we provide multiple recommendations regarding aspects that should be considered during the value-based requirements elicitation process. We explored the process’s applicability in practice and refined the value-based software development process.