Eliciting requirements in software engineering

In requirements elicitation is the practice of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders. requirement gathering". The term elicitation is used in books and research to raise the fact that good requirements cannot just be collected from the customer, as would be indicated by the name requirements gathering. Requirements elicitation is non-trivial because you can never be sure you get all requirements from the user and customer by just asking them what the system should do or not do (for Safety and Reliability). Requirements elicitation practices include interviews, questionnaires, user observation, workshops, Before requirements can be analyzed, modeled, or specified they must be gathered through an elicitation process. Requirements elicitation is a part of the requirements engineering process, usually followed by analysis and specification of the requirements. Commonly used elicitation processes are the stakeholder meetings or interviews. The requirements elicitation process may appear simple: ask the customer, the users and others what the objectives for the system or product are, what is to be accomplished, how the system or product fits into the needs of business, and finally, how the system or product is to be used on a day-to-day basis. However, issues may arise that complicate the process. In 1992, Christel and Kang identified problems that indicate the challenges for requirements elicitation: • ' Problems ...

Requirements engineering has traditionally been stakeholder-driven. In addition to domain knowledge, widespread digitalization has led to the generation of vast amounts of data (Big Data) from heterogeneous digital sources such as the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile devices, and social networks. The digital transformation has spawned new opportunities to consider such data as potentially valuable sources of requirements, although they are not intentionally created for requirements elicitation. A challenge to data-driven requirements engineering concerns the lack of methods to facilitate seamless and autonomous requirements elicitation from such dynamic and unintended digital sources. There are numerous challenges in processing the data effectively to be fully exploited in organizations. This article, thus, reviews the current state-of-the-art approaches to data-driven requirements elicitation from dynamic data sources and identifies research gaps. We obtained 1848 hits when searching six electronic databases. Through a two-level screening and a complementary forward and backward reference search, 68 papers were selected for final analysis. The results reveal that the existing automated requirements elicitation primarily focuses on utilizing human-sourced data, especially online reviews, as requirements sources, and supervised machine learning for data processing. The outcomes of automated requirements elicitation often result in mere identification and classification of r...

Published: 02 Nov 2016 The terms gathering requirements or eliciting requirements are commonly used to refer to the process of finding out what the mandates are for a given project or piece of software. But neither term accurately describes the actual process and, increasingly, may not even match participants' perceptions, especially for Agile projects. Gathering and eliciting easily are confused with implying a separate lifecycle requirements phase. Because Agile projects do not characterize their work as phases, some may feel Agile projects do not gather or elicit requirements. However, gathering and eliciting are activities that do occur in any project but may not be explicit in Agile. Thus, a product owner may state requirements without gathering or eliciting being evident, possibly because there wasn't any. Similarly, Agile developers may characterize their requirements activity as conversations rather than gathering or eliciting. Regardless, there is a more fundamental issue that makes the terms inappropriate. Gathering implies requirements are sitting around fully formed when, in fact, most requirements are hidden, though unintentionally. Eliciting more accurately describes the process of revealing not-so-observable requirements. However, both terms are misleading because: • You actually elicit or gather dataabout the requirements rather than the requirements themselves. • Requirements are discovered by analyzing the data. For these reasons, I refer to the process a...

In this article, you'll learn all about Software Requirements. You'll get an outline on the topic area, the process, and most importantly what your responsibilities are in this area as a software engineer. You should gain some insight into your role and activities with software requirements. If anything, you'll have something to discuss with colleagues after your next stand-up ? This article borrows heavily from the tome that is the Upfront, Why is this important? There is a misconception from those not in software engineering that the role of a software engineer is to just "write code." Yes, we're technologists who generally love learning programming. In reality, this is a simplistic view that under-values what a software engineer professional actually does in their day-to-day job and career. It focuses only on a slice of their overall responsibilities. A software engineer's role is to build business solutions at enterprise scale. This includes a large number of responsibilities that aren't related to the code they create. One area of responsibility you have as a professional software engineer is the area of software requirements. What are Software Requirements? Software Requirements on the surface sound simple. The software must do X for Y so that Z. Think about it for long enough on any problem that software could solve (or about existing software already solving a problem) and you could probably brainstorm a large number of requirements. Easy right? Well no, in fact, f...

Based on my understanding of the English language and trying to be logical about what should be the difference: Requirements Elicitation = Requirements Gathering. This is asking what are the requirements, what if this, what if that, etc. This is about asking the questions and getting responses. How well are the answers is another matter entirely. This requires the stakeholders to answer their part of what is to be done and why. Requirements Analysis. This is more the organizing of answers to the first part. Which solution is optimal? What are the trade-offs of various possible implementations. In this part there may be the odd question but it isn't the main point as this is about seeing which solution may be better under various constraints,e.g. which is the fastest or cheapest. This is more about how is something to be done and why does that way make more sense than another. Another way to think of this is that the Elicitation has to come before the Analysis as otherwise you are analyzing nothing, which may not be that useful or productive. Requirements Elicitation is about finding out what customers (and potential customers) say they think they want. It produces a wishlist (well, you might be polite and call it something else, but that's what it is). Requirements Analysis is about distilling the wishlist to produce a list of actual requirements together with dependencies between them. It also involves saying that some things on the wishlist are out of scope for one reaso...

Are you looking for a simple way to get more out of your requirements elicitation sessions? Would you like to make better use of yours and your stakeholder’s time? Would you be interested in learning a simple technique for improving your stakeholder meetings? A critical part of preparing for requirements elicitation is identifying a list of questions. You definitely want to avoid securing valuable stakeholder time only to be lost about what questions to ask! Some stakeholders will talk your ear off (forcing you to gently interrupt them to keep the meeting on track), but others need to be led through a structured conversation. Regardless of who I’m interviewing, I’ve found that preparing a list of requirements questions helps me keep the conversation on track. Here’s a video I recorded about preparing requirements questionnaires. This article is about identifying targeted questions for a project that has already been scoped, called a requirements questionnaire. If the scope of your project is not yet defined, you might want to check out “ 5 questions to ask before starting any technology project ” for some generic elicitation questions that work on most any project. What is a Requirements Questionnaire? A requirements questionnaire is a list of questions about the project requirements. Typically the questions are organized by feature (or business requirement or project objective). Essentially each high-level requirement from your scope document should have a list of questio...