Requirements elicitation as a case of social process: an approach to its description.

The point of view of this paper is that social software and business software need different kinds of processes, referred to as social processes and business processes, respectively. Business processes are mainly thought of as orchestrators of external activities to be carried out by users or by services; they embody a centralized perspective in which users are meant to interact with processes and not with each other. Social processes rely on a different paradigm, centered on the participants acting in a social space. The social space keeps track of the past actions so that each participant knows what has been done by the other participants; by acting on the social space, the participants can influence each other. This paper intends to investigate the features of social processes and to bring them to an explicit level of representation by means of an original language, called SPL (Social Processes Language). To this end, this paper analyzes a case of software production, in particular the requirements elicitation phase inspired by the CoREA method, and presents an SPL description of it.