Educational Software Requirements Elicitation Techniques: Including Children with Autistic Spectrum Condition

Although specialized literature and software engineering frameworks suggest techniques for elicitation of software requirements, no elicitation technique works for all situations. Challenges arising from end users' communication disabilities make choosing an adequate technique even more important to identify these users' usability and accessibility needs and preferences. Children with such disabilities, e.g. Autistic Spectrum Condition (ASC), are particularly challenging. The literature on software requirements elicitation for children with ASC seems particularly scanty. Here, systematic mapping studies of the literature, analyses of some software development frameworks and recommendations from practicing software engineers were considered to create an initial catalogue of elicitation techniques. Specialists on software and autism were then invited to evaluate the applicability of each of the catalogued techniques for children with an ASC. This paper brings results of such evaluation. As such it may assist software requirements engineers in selecting techniques that are more likely to successfully include children with ASCs in the requirements elicitation process. Future work could experiment with such techniques in (educational) software development contexts.