Techniques for Requirements Elicitation

This paper surveys and evaluates techniques for eliciting requirements of computer-based systems, paying particular attention to how they deal with social issues. The methods surveyed include introspection, interviews, questionnaires, and protocol, conversation, interaction, and discourse analyses. Although they are relatively untried in Requirements Engineering, we believe there is much promise in the last three techniques, which grew out of ethnomethodology and sociolinguistics. In particular, they can elicit tacit knowledge by observing actual interactions in the workplace, and can also be applied to the system development process itself. 1 Introduction A basic question in Requirements Engineering is how to find out what users really need. Research has shown that many large projects fail because of inadequate requirements [5]; moreover, this inadequacy is often related to social, political and cultural factors. This paper describes and assesses techniques for requirements elicitati..