Recommendation systems-based software requirements elicitation process—a systematic literature review

Abstract

Requirements elicitation is one of the fundamental sub-processes of requirements engineering which is used to find the needs of stakeholders. There are several activities in this sub-process, i.e., identification of stakeholders and their requirements, software requirements prioritization, and analysis. Recommendation systems have been intertwined with the requirements elicitation process to predict the stakeholders’ requirements based on their preferences for functional and non-functional requirements. A number of systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have been carried out in the area of requirements elicitation. These SLRs do not support the applications of the recommendation systems during the requirements elicitation process. To deal with this issue, we present an SLR on recommendation systems-based software requirements elicitation processes, from 2009 to 2022, undertaking four research questions: (a) What are the different activities of the software requirements elicitation methods? (b) What are the applications of recommendation systems in the identification of the software requirements? (c) How the recommendation systems can facilitate the identification of stakeholders in the requirements elicitation process? (d) What are the ways to automate the selection of requirements elicitation techniques? The aim of this study is to identify the research gaps in the area of recommendation systems-based requirements elicitation processes and suggest future research directions.