Requirements Elicitation Activities Research Articles

JOB FINDER WEBSITE FOR DISABLED PEOPLE: REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION

Requirements elicitation plays an important role as an activity to capture the needs from stakeholders in a variety of context. Being the earliest phase in requirements engineering process, we believed that the responsibility of selecting right requirements elicitation technique is among the essential factors contributing to the success or failure of developed system. This research explores the requirements elicitation activity within the context of developing Job Finder Website for disabled people. To provide a website that can fulfil disabled user needs, the requirements engineer certainly faced challenges. However, if an appropriate selection of requirements elicitation techniques was not neglected, requirements elicitation activity conducted with disabled people can gain accurate user requirements. This research refers to Malaysia Social Welfare Department’s as a case to study whether selected requirements elicitation technique is suitable for people with visual, communication, hearing and physical disability. Before the correct requirement elicitation techniques were selected, selection criteria were identified based on literature and interview session with Malaysia Social Welfare Department’s employees. We then demonstrate the applicability of selected techniques through illustrative examples. The output of this work is a list of requirements elicitation techniques to be applied in designing Job Finder Website for Disabled People.

Creativity and Design Thinking as Facilitators in Requirements Elicitation

Context: The use of Creativity and Design Thinking (C&DT) techniques favor the generation of new ideas based on the needs of users and stakeholders, and can support software developers during the process of requirements elicitation. Objectives: In this work, we aim to identify C&DT techniques to perform requirements elicitation proposed in the literature and in the industry and investigate the perception of software developers about using these techniques. Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the C&DT techniques in the literature and a regional survey with software development teams from several companies in Brazil to identify which techniques found in the literature are currently being used by organizations. The survey also investigated the level of knowledge that software developers have regarding the C&DT techniques, and whether they agree that the use of these techniques can help to achieve a more effective process of requirements elicitation. Results: In the SLR, we identified 86 C&DT techniques that support requirement elicitation activities. In the survey, most developers outlined that C&DT techniques facilitate requirements elicitation and stated that they have more knowledge and usage experience with DT techniques than creativity techniques. The most used DT techniques mentioned by survey participants were: interview, brainstorming, uses cases, activity analysis, user story, and rapid prototyping, whereas for creativity techniques were: analogies, creativity workshops, focus group, questions list, clarification, none and combining ideas. Conclusions: The results showed that despite the existence of a large number of techniques in the literature, the developers’ lack of knowledge about these techniques makes them not used in the industry. However, the developers’ responses showed that the use of C&DT techniques helps to make requirements elicitation more effective.

DEPENDENCIES BETWEEN REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION TECHNIQUES: A SURVEY STUDY IN UKRAINIAN COMPANIES

The subject of research in the article is requirements elicitation practices in IT projects. The goal of the work is to define how project context influences requirement elicitation technique selection and identify dependencies between requirement elicitation techniques. The following tasks are solved in the article: examine the industrial standards and experience of business analysts and requirements engineers in requirements acquisition activities, create and conduct a survey on practices in requirement elicitation activities in IT projects, define practitioners’ preferences regarding elicitation techniques, and define how project context influences requirement elicitation technique selection, identify dependencies between requirement elicitation techniques. The following methods are used: a survey was performed among business analysts and requirement engineers in Ukraine regarding their use of requirement elicitation techniques and the context of using them. The Chi-Square test of independence and Cramer’s V effect size measure were applied to define statistically significant dependencies between project context and elicitation techniques, as well as dependencies between techniques. The following results were obtained: Top elicitation techniques were identified and compared with other comprehensive studies. Twenty statistically significant associations for pairs "project context – elicitation technique" and "elicitation technique – elicitation technique" were found (based on the p-value and Cramer’s V effect size measure). Conclusion: It is concluded that project context influences particular elicitation technique selection in IT projects. There are also dependencies between requirements elicitation techniques. These dependencies can guide the selection of an initial set of techniques or adjust a set of used elicitation techniques during business analysis planning and monitoring activities.

Tool Proposal for Recommending Design Thinking Techniques in Software Development

Design Thinking (DT) has been incorporated into software processes by teams from startups to large companies, used in problem exploration fostering innovative solutions, and integrated into agile methods to satisfy the real stakeholders’ needs. DT places the customer needs up-front and helps to empathize with users, examining their behaviors, and producing outcomes focused on users’ demand. A set of techniques, like personas and user journey, can be used to support this human-centered approach. Selecting which technique to use might be challenging since factors such as the application scenario, stakeholder engagement level and previous knowledge of the problem-to-be-solved may vary from case to case. In our previous work we presented a DT session conducted to better understand the need for a recommendation tool, followed by a requirements elicitation activity in which we defined how the tool should work, and an early evaluation of the initial tool low-fidelity prototypes. Inspired by the Design Science Research method, in this article we extend our previous work by furthering what we performed in the tool’s definition process. We included in this work a requirements refining activity through high-level fidelity prototypes, and a requirements validation activity through a questionnaire-based feedback collection with professionals who have experience on the use of DT in software development. Our results show that our proposal offers an useful and easy to use tool to recommend DT techniques with the potential to support those professionals who apply DT in requirements engineering by suggesting techniques that are the best fit to the declared context.

Machine learning in requirements elicitation: a literature review

Abstract A growing trend in requirements elicitation is the use of machine learning (ML) techniques to automate the cumbersome requirement handling process. This literature review summarizes and analyzes studies that incorporate ML and natural language processing (NLP) into demand elicitation. We answer the following research questions: (1) What requirement elicitation activities are supported by ML? (2) What data sources are used to build ML-based requirement solutions? (3) What technologies, algorithms, and tools are used to build ML-based requirement elicitation? (4) How to construct an ML-based requirements elicitation method? (5) What are the available tools to support ML-based requirements elicitation methodology? Keywords derived from these research questions led to 975 records initially retrieved from 7 scientific search engines. Finally, 86 articles were selected for inclusion in the review. As the primary research finding, we identified 15 ML-based requirement elicitation tasks and classified them into four categories. Twelve different data sources for building a data-driven model are identified and classified in this literature review. In addition, we categorized the techniques for constructing ML-based requirement elicitation methods into five parts, which are Data Cleansing and Preprocessing, Textual Feature Extraction, Learning, Evaluation, and Tools. More specifically, 3 categories of preprocessing methods, 3 different feature extraction strategies, 12 different families of learning methods, 2 different evaluation strategies, and various off-the-shelf publicly available tools were identified. Furthermore, we discussed the limitations of the current studies and proposed eight potential directions for future research.

Selection of Requirement Elicitation Techniques: A Neural Network based Approach

Requirement Elicitation is key activity of requirement engineering and has a strong impact on design and other phases of software development life cycle. Poor requirement engineering practices lead to project failure. A sound requirement elicitation process is the foundation for the overall quality of software product. Due to criticality and high impact of this phase on overall success and failure of projects, it is very necessary to perform the requirements elicitation activities in a perfect and specific manner. The most difficult and demanding jobs during Requirement Elicitation phase is to select appropriate and specific technique from a wide array of techniques and tools. In this paper, a new approach is proposed using an artificial neural network for selection of requirement elicitation technique from a wide variety of tools and techniques that are available. The training of Neural Network is done by back propagation algorithm. The trained and resultant network can be used as a base for selection of requirement elicitation techniques.

Social network sites and requirements engineering: A systematic literature review

AbstractA large volume of highly diverse and real‐time data provided by social network sites has revolutionized several data analytical sciences such as stock exchange fluctuation prediction, sentiment analysis, and political affiliations prediction. From a software engineering viewpoint, social network sites have produced an unprecedented opportunity for software development organizations to monitor the opinion of the large population of users of their systems. The extracted data from social network sites can be used to extract information about newly launched systems, and it enable software development organizations to obtain rapid technical and social feedback about their systems. This paper presents on a systematic literature review of the published research articles on how requirements engineering (RE) activities are conducted using social network sites, elaborated in studies published between 2011 and 2019. From the resulting studies, we extracted data to answer our four questions related to social network site (SNS)‐based RE approaches focusing on requirements elicitation, prioritization, and negotiation activities. Thirty‐one relevant studies were identified and analyzed to answer our research questions. Among 31 studies, 62% of the studies reportedly support requirements elicitation activity, and 14% of the studies reportedly support requirements elicitation, prioritization, and negotiation activities. Ten percent studies were about requirements elicitation and prioritization activities, 7% of the studies support both requirements elicitation and negotiation activities, and prioritization activity was supported by 7% of the studies. It was also observed that 58% of the selected studies adopted semi‐automatic approaches to conduct RE activities while 21% of the selected studies proposed automatic tools, and 21% of the selected studies adopted manual approaches to conduct RE activities. The outcomes of this systematic literature review indicate that social network sites can be a major source that can be used successfully to extract and identify user requirements. Moreover, this systematic literature review also presents implications of this study for practitioners and researchers including challenges, unresolved issues, and future research directions.

User stories collection via interactive chatbot to support requirements gathering

Nowadays, software products have become an essential part of human life. To build software, developers must have a good understanding of the requirements of the software. However, software developers tend to jumpstart system construction without having a clear and detailed understanding of the requirements. The user story concept is one of the practices of the requirements elicitation. This paper aims to present the work conducted to develop an Android chatbot application to support the requirements elicitation activity in software engineering, making the work less time-consuming and structured even for users not accustomed to requirements engineering. The chatbot uses Nazief & Adriani stemming algorithm to pre-process the natural language it receives from the users and artificial mark-up language (AIML) as the knowledge base to process the bot’s responses. A preliminary acceptance test based on the technology acceptance model results in an 83.03% score for users’ behavioral intention to use.

Design Thinking: Challenges for Software Requirements Elicitation

Agile methods fit well for software development teams in the requirements elicitation activities. It has brought challenges to organizations in adopting the existing traditional methods, as well as new ones. Design Thinking has been used as a requirements elicitation technique and immersion in the process areas, which brings the client closer to the software project team and enables the creation of better projects. With the use of data triangulation, this paper brings a literature review that collected the challenges in software requirements elicitation in agile methodologies and the use of Design Thinking. The result gave way to a case study in a Brazilian public organization project, via user workshop questionnaire with 20 items, applied during the study, in order to identify the practice of Design Thinking in this context. We propose here an overview of 13 studied challenges, from which eight presented strong evidence of contribution (stakeholders involvement, requirements definition and validation, schedule, planning, requirement details and prioritization, and interdependence), three presented partial evidence of contribution and two were not eligible for conclusions (non-functional requirements, use of artifacts, and change of requirements). The main output of this work is to present an analysis of the use of Design Thinking to see if it fits properly to be used as a means of solving the challenges of elicitation of software requirements when using agile methods.

Integrating AI Techniques in Requirements Elicitation

Requirements elicitation is known as most acute knowledge intensive activity of the procedure of software. The quality of the requirements supports in the success of any software development. The review of literature reveals that scientists have prepared major supports by emerging various tools and methods of requirement elicitation process. However, there are still many challenges faced by requirements engineers in order to carry out requirements elicitation activity in the entire process. Some of the key challenges are poor communication between user and analyst, support tools and stakeholder involvement. These issues may lead to inefficient result and the end of the system development. The previous research history exposes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods may help in this regard by providing effective communication between user and analyst by proposing several methods/tools to computerize certain procedures up to a certain extent. The intention of this study is to classify the issues in every phase of the requirements elicitation and explore of AI techniques to solve these recognized challenges. Additionally, the study also discovers the connection between these challenges and their potential AI explanation/s through Venn-Diagram. This study is an addition towards our prior efforts and here, an attempt is made to incorporate and describe AI techniques in many requirements elicitation techniques.

Requirements elicitation for a blockchain vaccine supply chain management web/mobile application

Background: This paper presents the processes carried out to be able to develop/gather the complete and right requirements to developing a secure and effective blockchain system for the vaccine supply chain. The paper hence presents the requirements elicitation activity of the Blockchain web/mobile application for vaccine supply chain. Methods: A mixed-methods methodology was applied. The methods employed were; document review, survey, focus group workshops, interviews, observation, brainstorming, brainwriting Unified Modeling Language and system dynamics. Results: The paper present results of each of the methods used in requirements elicitation for eight themes, namely: temperature monitoring; quality, suitability and capacity of transport facilities; information systems and supportive management functions; storage quality, suitability and capacity; maintenance of cold-chain equipment; vaccine distribution; vaccine management policies and stock management. The results presented gave understanding of the operation of the existing vaccine supply chain and the requirements for the blockchain web/mobile application for vaccine supply chain. Conclusions: The requirements for the development of the desired vaccine supply chain web/mobile application were captured and documented.

Experiences of using a game for improving learning in software requirements elicitation

Many recent studies have demonstrated that the traditional methods used in teaching software requirements elicitation are ineffective because they frequently produce unskilled graduates who are inappropriately trained to apply their practical knowledge in the workplace. Therefore, the combination of traditional teaching approaches and modern learning tools has been used to better prepare undergraduate students. Biyubi is a game that has been developed to complement traditional teaching in order to facilitate the learning of requirements elicitation activities on an undergraduate Software Engineering course. Biyubi provides a simulated environment for students so that they can explore, analyze, and discover the wishes and needs of the correct stakeholders. This game has been tested and validated by undergraduate students from the NovaUniversitas University, Mexico. The use of Biyubi achieved an increase in the motivation, satisfaction, and learning experience of students in requirements elicitation. The game has the potential to better explain the proper use of a requirements elicitation technique while the technical skills of the students are also improved.

Your Wish, My Command – Speeding up Projects in the Transportation Industry Using Ontologies

AbstractThis paper presents the results of an exploratory study conducted at ALSTOM on the application of knowledge‐centric approaches to the requirements definition process. The original scope of the study concerned the application of ontologies to analyze and improve the quality of specification documents in an industrial context. An additional idea quickly emerged as a collateral benefit of the study to extend the usage of the gathered knowledge base in order to perform computer‐assisted identification of requirements from structured and unstructured documents. The purpose of this new approach is to improve the execution of projects in railway transportation by accelerating the requirements management and development processes and, in particular, the stakeholder requirements capture and elicitation activities.

Designing a Conference for Women Entering Academe in the Sciences and Engineering

Women are underrepresented among faculty in the sciences and engineering. The National Science Foundation's ADVANCE program seeks to address this issue through comprehensive and creative strategies aimed at institutional transformation. Virginia Tech's ADVANCE program (AdvanceVT) hosted a conference for women in the academic pipeline to facilitate their entry into academic careers. This paper discusses our efforts in designing this conference; we hope that it will help to address the relative lack of literature on conference design and provide a starting point for others who are designing conferences. We first introduce four conference design heuristics that emerged during the process of determining what information to present at the AdvanceVT conference and how to present it: (1) undertake requirements elicitation, (2) choose an appropriate modality for presenting information, (3) account for interactions, and (4) emphasize shared interests and traits. We then discuss the application of these heuristics to the first design iteration of the AdvanceVT conference. Included in the discussion of the application of the heuristics are the results of three requirements elicitation activities: an online survey, focus groups, and interviews.

Effect of Domain Knowledge on Elicitation Effectiveness: An Internally Replicated Controlled Experiment

Context. Requirements elicitation is a highly communicative activity in which human interactions play a critical role. A number of analyst characteristics or skills may influence elicitation process effectiveness. Aim . Study the influence of analyst problem domain knowledge on elicitation effectiveness. Method . We executed a controlled experiment with post-graduate students. The experimental task was to elicit requirements using open interview and consolidate the elicited information immediately afterwards. We used four different problem domains about which students had different levels of knowledge. Two tasks were used in the experiment, whereas the other two were used in an internal replication of the experiment; that is, we repeated the experiment with the same subjects but with different domains. Results. Analyst problem domain knowledge has a small but statistically significant effect on the effectiveness of the requirements elicitation activity. The interviewee has a big positive and significant influence, as does general training in requirements activities and interview experience. Conclusion. During early contacts with the customer, a key factor is the interviewee; however, training in tasks related to requirements elicitation and knowledge of the problem domain helps requirements analysts to be more effective.

APPLICABILITY AND USABILITY OF PREDEFINED NATURAL LANGUAGE BOILERPLATES IN DOCUMENTING REQUIREMENTS

Natural language is frequently applied to document the stakeholders’ statements during requirement elicitation activities. Nevertheless, the use of generic natural language has potential for the issues of unclear and inconsistent requirements. These issues may result from the diverse interpretations by the stakeholders or other various sources of documents and artefacts. The main objective of this paper was to discuss the definition and application of predefined boilerplates to specify the requirements in the form of natural language statements. The proposed boilerplates were defined and classified based on two main types of requirements, namely functional and non-functional (performance, constraints, and specific quality). Two methods have been applied to evaluate the research results; the applicability of the predefined boilerplates was demonstrated using two different case studies, and the usability aspect is evaluated through synthetic environment experimentation using human respondents. As a summary, the predefined boilerplates were found helpful, especially among novice requirement engineers to express and specify their requirements in a consistent manner and a standardized way, relatively able to improve the quality of the natural language statements.

Eliciting and prioritizing quality requirements supported by ontologies: a case study using the ElicitO framework and tool

AbstractAs software complexity grows and clients demand higher quality software, quality requirements can no longer be considered to be of secondary importance. Thus, eliciting, specifying, prioritizing and validating quality requirements is a prerequisite to the development of effective and efficient information systems. Despite the critical importance of quality requirements, there is a considerable gap in the breadth and depth of quality requirements engineering (RE) support in most RE approaches. In practice, it is often the case to have quality requirements considered as an afterthought in the systems development process. While there is a wealth of modelling techniques and tools for functional requirements, there is very limited support for quality requirements in RE. Support for quality requirements is usually ad‐hoc, without clear guidelines on how to capture, specify and manage quality requirements and also without proper usage of standardized terminologies based on established quality models such as the ISO/IEC 9126 quality model. In this paper, we discuss a quality‐driven RE framework and tool that applies knowledge management techniques and quality ontologies to support RE activities. The ontology implements the quality characteristics and metrics prescribed by the ISO/9126 quality model, providing a common vocabulary to address quality concerns/aspects across RE activities. We empirically validate how the framework and tool can be used to effectively support the requirements elicitation and prioritization activities through a case study addressing the development of an intranet portal project at the University of Manchester.

Extracting Soft Issues during Requirements Elicitation:A Preliminary Study

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical process in Software Engineering (SE) activities. RE helps stakeholders to manage requirements appropriately before dedicated requirements are used to design and implement software. The first stage in RE process is known as requirements elicitation whereby during elicitation, stakeholders will perform a set of activities to permit understanding in problem domain for respected scenario and hence proposing a set of established requirements in developing software. In elicitation, stakeholders need to collaborate and communicate in order to produce unambiguous requirements and create mutual agreement for software design and development. This can produce desired solution for all stakeholders. Soft issue is one of non-technical requirements that can associate with social presence, social interaction elements such as comfort, connectedness and motivation. This requirements need to be emphasized during RE process especially for a system that is categorized in Computer- Supported Collaboration Working (CSCW) domain. Users need CSCW domain system to carry out virtual communication, knowledge sharing via system's features. The aim of this paper is to carry out a preliminary study on RE process and requirements elicitation activities by identifying whether soft issues have been engaged in existing requirements elicitation process. Another aim is to compare stakeholders' roles based on selected articles. The method to investigate requirements elicitation process is done by identifying existing elicitation processes as well as involvement of stakeholders' collaboration during elicitation. According to the study, the comparison of existing requirements elicitation processes and comparison of job roles have been produced as a result in this paper.