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56 S o f t w a r e & S y s t e m s R e q u i r e m e n t s E n g i n e e r i n g : I n P r a c t i c e

Unstructured Ideas Grouped Related Ideas

Expanded and Prioritized Ideas Categorized Ideas

FIGURE 3.7 Stages of a brainstorming session

The general explained to the captain that when he went in to class,
he always hid his rank as best he could to avoid intimidating the
other students, as he wanted their unbiased opinions. In business, it
is the role of the facilitator to prevent intimidation or speech making
from occurring, and to keep the session moving smoothly.
The objective and duration of the brainstorming session must be
agreed upon by all the participants. This should ideally be determined
prior to the start of the session. The session starts with a free flow of
ideas, creating an unsorted set of product suggestions. Often “sticky
notes” are used to record the ideas, and they are placed on a board
(see Figure 3.7). Some general brainstorming protocols include
allowing duplicates or similar ideas to be recorded, and discouraging
filtering or censorship; e.g., allow “extreme” ideas.
The next activity in brainstorming is the condensation of the ideas
to group related concepts and eliminate redundancy. The third activity
is to formally assign the ideas to categories. Next, the group breaks up
into small teams that assess the ideas and expand upon them.
Within each group, the ideas are then ranked (pairwise ranking).
Finally, the brainstorming session is concluded with action items
where appropriate for participants in the session. If the session was
attended by customers not involved in analysis, then the post-session
activities are usually done internally by project team members and
company stakeholders.

Tabular Elicitation Techniques
The use of tables can provide a compact, unambiguous method for
capturing stakeholder requests. Two types of widely used tabular