The Problem
One of the major problems faced by software engineering tools is providing adequate support for multiple stakeholders involved in the software development process since early inception and traceability between the early requirement level models and the end-product artifacts.

User-centered design of new tools for promoting co-authoring and co-evolutionary development of requirements over a common semantic model could bring many benefits such as increased stakeholder involvement and information sharing, increased traceability and usable ways to negotiate requirements as well as prioritize development tasks.

Our Hypothesis
We hypothesize that (a) the structure of use (the users’ tasks) of a system influences the conceptual system architecture and that influence can be used for requirements negotiation and prioritizing development tasks; (b) the UML can be successfully used as a common semantic model to facilitate communication and promote artifact co-authoring by different-background stakeholders, as long as this is supported by user-centered tools; and (c) requirements elicitation can be leveraged through multimodal, user-centered collaborative environments (not just descriptive modeling tools like the current ones.

The Main Goals of Our Research:

We aim at achieving a technological solution for facilitating information sharing during requirements elicitation and management by a group of diverse-background stakeholders. We also wish to ease the process of prioritizing development tasks as well as requirements negotiation by allowing all stakeholders to view the impact of a given set of use cases in the conceptual architecture of a system.

By tracing the requirements of a system (in terms of user intentions and system responsibilities) to the conceptual architecture of that same system, and easily extracting that architecture from task flows, we wish to achieve usable tools supporting the workstyles and activities of clients, marketers and software engineers.