Identifying Design Features Using Combination of Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Abstract

Requirements elicitation (RE) is the explanatory development activity of helping users figure out what they want. However, acquisition of requirements is challenging and inappropriate requirements might lead to unncessary project development cost. It is important to validate the requirements with various possible techniques to design a software solution. It is equally important to choose appropriate techniques for RE. To understand the importance of RE, Energy feedback or visualization of electricity consumption application had been chosen which would help in reducing household electricity consumption by motivating the residential end-users. To design an effective and innovative solution for visualization application, this article used a combination of three RE techniques, viz., systematic literature review (SLR), crowdsourcing survey and user-centred design (UCD) based design activity. The SLR assessed 22 studies, while the crowdsourcing survey and the design activity had 137 and 6 participants respectively. The RE techniques were interdependent and the results from each technique was fed to design the subsequent phases. Each of the RE techniques' motivation, procedure and its results were discussed and were statistically compared with each other forming the top seven features of the system to be developed. This study also analyzed the effectiveness of the requirements elicitation by conducting retrospective on the RE techniques. The retrospective analyzed things that went well, things that did not go well, and things that can be improved. It led to the discussion on how effectively can this process be improved to collect the requirements.