Abstract
In requirements analysis the task of elicitation of stakeholder need has been a continuing source of error and frustration in systems development. To aid in the acquisition of a set of proper needs that are critical to the design of an effective system, the systems analyst is provided with a new tool to assist in determining when group consensus has been met with respect to the identification of one or more needs. A recently developed measurement tool for measuring subjective concepts like consensus, agreement, and dissent is described. Categorical data are frequently collected using an ordinal scale such as the Likert scale and a new method is available that gives the analyst a different perspective of group-think. The agreement measure is also extended to an agreement distribution and used to calculate a mathematical distance between two separate agreement distributions. With these measures it is easy to calculate the proximity of agreement between two or more groups of stakeholders. This measure is then applied to requirements analysis.