Collaborative and AI-Supported Requirements Elicitation: An Empirical Study
Requirements elicitation requires stakeholders to communicate needs, negotiate priorities, and collaboratively construct knowledge that can be transformed into software requirements artifacts. Recent advances in LLMs have created opportunities to support these activities through AI-assisted collaboration and automated artifact generation. However, limited empirical evidence is available regarding how AI-supported collaborative environments influence requirements elicitation outcomes. In this study, we conducted a mixed-method controlled experiment comparing four requirements elicitation approaches: collaborative elicitation without AI support, collaborative elicitation supported by the Strateegia platform and its GPT-powered Writer applet, direct requirements generation using a Large Language Model, and requirements generation from collaborative discussion transcripts using a Large Language Model. We evaluated the resulting artifacts using quality criteria derived from ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 and collected participant perceptions regarding the elicitation process. Our findings indicate that approaches combining stakeholder collaboration and AI-supported synthesis produced the highest-rated requirements artifacts and were perceived as clearer and easier to execute than traditional collaborative elicitation. The results suggest that generative AI can support the transformation of collaboratively generated knowledge into structured requirements documentation while preserving the value of stakeholder participation. We discuss implications for AI-supported requirements elicitation and human-AI collaboration in Requirements Engineering.