Are there any requirements gathering tools that have a voting system built in? Using categorization is not working well as the law of the land has been whomever reviewed it last has the final say. This has been a proposed solution to settle differences in opinion during the requirements phase of a project. Design by committee is a well known antipattern. There is a standard 'trick' of categorizing things as nice to have and providing an opportunity for others to realize the lack of value certain requirements have. Unfortunately the request to allow a democratic decision process seems too reasonable to refuse.
A:
Jira is an issue tracker and overall project management system that I have found works quiet well. It has voting.
Shane C. Mason
2009-04-13 00:02:39
+1
A:
Bugzilla, while an issue tracker rather than a requirements gathering tool, also has a voting mechanism.
Uri
2009-04-13 00:03:50
Is there any literature tying the voting mechanisms to final quality or user satisfaction?
ojblass
2009-04-13 00:45:53
I admit that I don't know, my research was on a different topic. You may want to look at value-based requirement engineering. There's decent literature on that. Voting may be a form of value.
Uri
2009-04-13 02:09:21
You're welcome. Sorry I can't help more with this, as it's very far from my field. But the ACM DL may help you get lots of info on req engineering, since there are many academic conferences devoted to it.
Uri
2009-04-13 05:00:05
Is there really that much of a difference between a "requirement" and an "issue"? True, usually an issue is a bug, but if you pushed hard enough, you could probably make most bug/issue trackers into requirements tools.
Thomas Owens
2009-06-30 22:19:52
A:
Playground has voting built-in, and it is a tool specifically designed for requirements elicitation and organization (disclosure: I am the owner/developer)
However - in most situations, stakeholders do NOT have equal votes - some of them have a higher authority and decision-making power. Voting can be most successfully used when "outsourcing ideas" from the outside - see UserVoice. On internal as well as client projects, you simply build whatever the client desires.
Tomas Kohl
2009-04-13 10:09:02