Are requirements elicitation sessions influenced by participants' gender? An empirical experiment

Context: Requirements elicitation is a crucial phase in the software development life cycle. During requirements elicitation sessions, requirements engineers capture software requirements, and motivate stakeholders to express needs and expected software functionalities. In this context, there is a lack of extensive empirical research reporting the extent to which elicitation sessions can be influenced by participants' gender. Objective: This paper presents our research endeavour to investigate requirements engineers' effort and elicited requirements' accuracy based on participants' gender. Method: We conducted an experiment in two rounds with a total of 59 students who played the role of requirements engineers. In the first experimental task, the participant watched two videos where men and women stakeholders expressed software requirements. Later on, the participants specified software requirements in the shape of Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and next they generated Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) from those models. Results: We observed two significant differences. One between men and women requirements engineers in terms of dedicated effort during requirements specification: men took less effort. Other between stakeholders' gender in terms of accuracy resulted of BPMN models: models built from men stakeholders yield more accuracy. On the contrary, accuracy of resulted GUIs models did not show significant differences regarding requirements engineers or stakeholders' gender. Conclusions: Analysing descriptive data, women spent more time both as stakeholders and as requirements engineers but their accuracy is better.