Software Requirement Elicitation Process

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Index Terms ___Requirements, Elicitation, Techniques, responsibilities

Introduction

Software requirement engineering is a process of requirements elicitation, requirements analysis, requirements specification and requirements management. Requirements elicitation deals with the gathering of requirements from stakeholders. Requirement analysis process analyzes those requirements with respect to customers or stakeholders needs and defines the problem domain. While in specification a specification document has been produced that specifies the solution domain specific requirements, functions, procedures and time constraints etc. Requirements management manages the changes in requirements produced by business processes and needs.

The success of any organization depends on the production of good and quality software products, and good and quality software products can be produced by getting good requirements from stakeholders If gathered requirements are wrong end product will not be according to user’s needs. And dissatisfying user’s needs means failure to that software.

Importance of requirement engineering process

Requirements are attributes that are discovered before the development of products. It is a capability or condition. For satisfying any type of contract, specifications, standard or any other formal document system should possess this capability or condition.[1].

"Well-formed requirement is a statement of system functionality that satisfies customer needs". [2].

Software Requirement Elicitation Process

Software requirement elicitation process is an approach through which requirements can be gathered systematically from different stakeholders. Requirements for the desired system are gathered from different viewpoints e.g from user’s perspective, from organization’s perspective, constraints, trade marketing and system’s operating environment.

In software requirement elicitation phase first different stakeholders are being identified. Then requirements are being gathered from those stakeholders. Different type of requirements are gathered from these stakeholders e.g users requirements, business requirements, product requirements, constraints, security requirements, operating system requirements , information services requirements etc.

These requirements can be gathered through various methods and techniques. And these requirements need to be correctly gathered as sometimes misunderstanding occurs between stakeholders. Sometimes some requirements are confusing and not clearly described by user etc. The methods and techniques used for elicitation should be productive enough to get good requirements. After collection of requirements next phase is requirements analysis then requirements development and specification and in the end requirements management.

Scope of the research:

We have discussed the different papers which are analyzing the requirements elicitation process its methods and techniques. We have discussed the important factors that are important for elicitation process.

Structure of the paper:

Following is the organization of this report:

Section I highlights the introduction and objectives of the research undertaken.

Section II describes the reviewed literature of elicitation process.

Section III gives the insight of discussion of the reviewed literature about elicitation process

Section IV gives the conclusion of the research study.

Literature Review

Model for Software Development and Requirements Management

Dhirendra Pandey et.al [3] in their research paper has briefly described the importance of software requirement engineering process. For the correct development of software gathering of correct requirements from stakeholders is crucial. In this paper they have proposed the effective requirements engineering process model for production of quality requirements for development of software. In this model they have related all the important aspects of requirement engineering process to software development process for finding out good and correct requirements from variety of sources that can be implemented in software development. In their paper they have also related the requirement management and planning phase to the software development phases.

Selecting Requirement Elicitation Techniques for Software Projects

Saurabi tiwari et.al [4] in this paper has described the importance of Requirement Elicitation process techniques used for this process and also has provided some guidelines for selecting elicitation techniques for a new project. In this paper at first they have defined the techniques available for Elicitation process and their contextual applications. And has briefly explained the characteristics of these elicitations techniques which help someone to use which technique is better for their project. These techniques are known as traditional techniques, collaborative techniques, cognitive techniques, observational techniques and other techniques like SSM etc. Then they have represented three projects as an example and mapped some of specific techniques of elicitation on them which guides reader on anyone how to use perfect and good technique for their project. In the end they have concluded that it’s not possible to reach to any conclusion that which technique is better but however by analyzing the domain of the problem some characteristics can be identified which can help someone to decide which technique he should choose.

StakeRare: Using Social Networks and Collaborative Filtering for Large-Scale Requirements Elicitation

Soo Ling Lim et.al [5] in this paper they proposed the StakeRare method that uses collaborative filtering and social networks to priorities and identify requirements in big software projects. According to them this method basically identifies stakeholders and these stakeholders further recommends other stakeholders and their roles which builds a social network with stakeholders as nodes and their recommendations as links, also prioritizes stakeholders using some social network measures to determine what is their influence on project. And vice versa for requirements this method then asks stakeholders for rating the initial list of requirements, then recommending other relevant requirements to them using collaborative filtering, prioritizes their requirements using their ratings weighted b their project influence. They have also worked on extensive empirical evaluation of methods by using large scale software projects. In the conclusion they stated that use of StakeRare method will reduce the chance of failure of project from information overload, biased prioritization of requirements and inappropriate stakeholder inputs.

REAS: An Interactive Semi-Automated System for Software Requirements Elicitation Assistance

Hannan Hamed elazhary [6] in this paper has presented an interactive semi-automated system which helps user to avoid faulty requirements which can lead towards the development of faulty software product. This interactive system has two approaches. In this system first approach comprises with the avoidance of presence of imprecision while writhing of requirements. And the second approach tries to detect and correct many types of imprecision after the requirements are written. This has been achieved by imposing the use of good writing style and by matching the conversation between the user and requirements engineer. And then this system produces explanations that helps in correction and detection of any missed imprecision. In the end they stated that their proposed system has proved to be successful in dealing with imprecision in the syntax etc. According to them their proposed system can helps software engineer in detecting and correcting any missed imprecision by using those explanations which are produced by system. This system is also capable of maintaining consistency. They have used lexical analyzer and parser generator type techniques in this system.

Requirements Elicitation Using BPM Notations: Focusing on the Strategic Level Representation

Carlos Monsalve et.al [7] has presented this paper. Business process models (BPM) might be very useful for requirements elicitation process. And as requirement elicitation process compromises of involvement of stakeholders so BPM should also be shared with all the stakeholders. The problem which can come across is incapability of some organizations to end up with consistent BPM which covers all stakeholders’ constraints and need. They have mentioned in this paper that this problem can be solved with the help of using MLA (Multiple levels of abstraction) that can be strategic, operational and tactical levels. It can be used in different process oriented initiatives which facilitates the integration of all the stakeholders constraints and needs etc. This paper is basically based on the survey of use of MLA in recent BPM research publications. It also surveys the reports on case study which is related to BPM action-research conducted in a Canadian organization. This paper has presented a good solution approach or BPM. In this paper he has briefly described the three levels of managerial activities strategic, operational and tactical levels. Results of case study and BPM notations has been produced and reported.

discussion

There are several different ways to do elicitation process. As from reviewing second paper we came to know more about elicitation techniques that can be used in the whole process e.g interviewing , brainstorming, JAD and prototype etc but these all techniques can be used according to the software product’s needs. Sometimes problems occurs in process of gathering requirements like misunderstanding between stakeholders and requirements manager, limitation of resources, users inefficiency in domain etc these problems can be solved by carefully using the different technique interchangeably. Then further by reviewing more papers we observed there are different other methods which helps in prioritizing the stakeholders, their needs and requirements. Then there are different softwares like REAS (an Interactive Semi-Automated System for Software Requirements Elicitation Assistance) which helps user to avoid faulty requirements and if some imprecision and faults occurs to detect and correct them. Different approaches, methods, techniques, softwares and notations can be used in order to get correct requirements in a correct way. The most important factor in whole development cycle is having correct requirements and different organizations are using different methods for the elicitation process.

conclusion

Different papers are analyzed in this research paper related to elicitation process. The whole development of software depends on the requirements engineering phase. Getting correct requirements then analysis of these requirements and also dealing with changes in requirements it all leads towards development of good software product.

In this research paper our main focus was on requirements elicitation process. It is a first step towards software development. Different studies shows that there are different techniques, and methods to do this process, and all these methods are good and can be adopted according to developers needs.