What do you mean by that?

Eliciting software product requirements from customers is challenging and often frustrating. The process has been traditionally approached from a combination of psychological and software engineering perspectives. Over the past five years an alternative approach to requirements elicitation has begun to evolve. Researchers in computing and sociology at Lancaster University, England have begun to apply ethnography; a method which has been occasionally used in industrial design, to the software requirements elicitation process. Ethnography uses specialized interviewing and participant observation techniques to account for situational context and capture information in a culture's own terms. Research on applying ethnography to requirements elicitation has yielded at least one attempt to structure ethnographic techniques into a design methodology. While the potential benefits of using ethnography in requirements elicitation and product design are well documented, implementing ethnographic tools in requirements elicitation has been given only cursory attention in requirements texts. Researchers admit that very few requirements professionals have made practical use of ethnographic tools. By carefully selecting techniques from ethnography and streamlining them for application to software requirements analysis, we will begin to remedy that gap. The intent of this paper is to increase software practitioners' awareness and understanding of ethnographic tools so that requirements practitioners can take advantage of ethnographic tools in actual software engineering. Ethnographic principles and interviewing techniques are presented along with the potential benefits of ethnographic methods for improving requirements elicitation and validation. We provide practical guidelines for applying the material to software requirements elicitation and close by discussing the implementation challenges posed by commercial software development in Internet-time.