Identifying Key Factors for Using Ethnography in Software Requirements Elicitation: A Systematic Literature Review

During the early activities of developing the require-ments for a software product, selecting appropriate elicitation techniques is crucial. If not addressed early, missing, misin-terpreted, and incorrect requirements can lead to significant rework. The selection process for the elicitation techniques involves thorough analysis to determine if the chosen techniques are suitable for the product and project. Ethnography could be used as a requirements elicitation technique; although it is not commonly utilized, it has proven useful under certain circumstances. The main objective of this research is to identify case studies where ethnography has been employed as a requirements elicitation technique and to identify common features among them. A systematic literature review is conducted to achieve this objective, utilizing automatic searching across five different databases. This search yielded eleven studies where ethnography was used as an elicitation technique. Our findings determined that ethnography is particularly beneficial in five types of projects: collaborative projects, critical system projects, inter-field projects, high-budget projects, and projects where the analyst lacks domain expertise.