Facing the brainstorming theory. A case of requirements elicitation

Knowledge is still considered to be power and its externalization makes it possible for others to use that power. In this paper, we examine the theory of brainstorming, and the claim by father Alex Osborn that in a group session an individual can think of twice as many ideas than working alone. In the context of requirements elicitation, we performed an experiment on a “nominal” and a “real” group of participants, following a procedure based on the Jaccard index. However, the obtained results do not provide evidence to support the above opinion, because during a five-minute session, participants working individually produce over 43% more ideas than a group of different participants.