Does Neuro-Linguistic Programming improve requirements analyst recall and recognition abilities?: an exploratory study

The present master's work is related to the area of Software Requirements, focusing on the Requirements Elicitation phase. Requirements elicitation is the origin of software requirements and how software engineers collect information to understand the problem that software will solve. The fluid communication between the diferent stakeholders of a software system is one of the basic principles of a good requirements elicitation process. For that reason, the human activity is fundamental. Software engineers use elicitation techniques as interviews to obtain information from stakeholders. Completing the interview technique with mechanisms that help the analyst improves the efectiveness of information acquisition. The objective of this master thesis is to study if neuro-linguistic programming improves the amount of information an analyst can acquire from stakeholders during the requirements elicitation process. The Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) is an approach on personal development and communication. We performed an exploratory study with a total of 14 experimental subjects. They were students enrolled in a Master level course related to Computer Science or Software Engineering. Other subjects are professionals who belong, or not, to the area of computer science. Subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental groups. G1 for those who applied NLP and G2 for those who did not. G1 group had to execute an NLP exercise, the Alphabet Game, before initiating the elicitation session. The experimental session consisted in carrying out an elicitation session on a problem domain. The session consisted of: listening and understanding an audio. Subjects then had to make a written report and finally make a recall/recognition assessment. We concluded that: Neuro-linguistic programming has an effect positive in the amount of Recall Information (i.e., information that an analyst would be able to specify in details) during an elicitation session. On the other hand, neuro-linguistic programming seems do not have an effect ...