Requirements Elicitation Techniques Research Articles

PARSIMONIOUS MACHINE LEARNING MODELS IN REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION TECHNIQUES SELECTION

The subject of research in the article is machine learning algorithms used for requirement elicitation technique selection. The goal of the work is to build effective parsimonious machine learning models to predict the using particular elicitation techniques in IT projects that allow using as few predictor variables as possible without a significant deterioration in the prediction quality. The following tasks are solved in the article: design an algorithm to build parsimonious machine learning candidate models for requirement elicitation technique selection based on gathered information on practitioners' experience, assess parsimonious machine learning model accuracy, and design an algorithm for the best candidate model selection. The following methods are used: algorithm theory, statistics theory, sampling techniques, data modeling theory, and science experiments. The following results were obtained: 1) parsimonious machine learning candidate models were built for the requirement elicitation technique selection. They included less number of features that helps in the future to avoid overfitting problems associated with the best-fit models; 2) according to the proposed algorithm for best candidate selection – a single parsimonious model with satisfied performance was chosen. Conclusion: An algorithm is proposed to build parsimonious candidate models for requirement elicitation technique selection that avoids the overfitting problem. The algorithm for the best candidate model selection identifies when a parsimonious model's performance is degraded and decides on the suitable model's selection. Both proposed algorithms were successfully tested with four datasets and can be proposed for their extensions to others.

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.

An Approach towards Goal-Oriented Requirements Ontology: Consistency and Completeness Based Requirements Analysis

The paper presents a new approach to managing software requirement elicitation techniques with a high level of analyses based on domain ontology techniques, where we established a mapping between user scenario, structured requirement, and domain ontology techniques to improve many attributes such as requirement consistency, completeness and eliminating duplicate requirements to reduce risk of overrun time and budgets. One of the main targets of requirement engineering is to develop a requirement document with high quality. So, we proposed a user interface to collect all vital information about the project directly from the regular user and requirement engineering; After that, the proposal will generate an ontology based on semantic relations and rules. Requirements Engineering tries to keep requirements throughout a project’s life cycle consistent necessities clear, and up to date. This prototype allows mapping requirement scenarios into ontology elements for semantically interrupted. The general points of our prototype are to guarantee the identification requirements and improved nature of the Software Requirements Specification (SRS) by solving incomplete and conflicting information in the requirements specification.

Analyzing Requirements Elicitation Techniques: understanding the use and challenges to strength the requirements phase - Supplementary material

Analyzing Requirements Elicitation Techniques: understanding the use and challenges to strength the requirements phase - Supplementary material

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.

Deep Learning Model for Selecting Suitable Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Requirement elicitation represents one of the most vital phases in information system (IS) and software development projects. Selecting suitable elicitation techniques is critical for eliciting the correct specification in various projects. Recent studies have revealed that improper novice practices in this phase have increased the failure rate in both IS and software development projects. Previous research has primarily relied on creating procedural systems based on contextual studies of elicitation properties. In contrast, this paper introduces a deep learning model for selecting suitable requirement elicitation. An experiment was conducted wherein a collected dataset of 1684 technique selection attributes were investigate with respect to 14 elicitation techniques. The study adopted seven criteria to evaluate predictive model performance using confusion matrix accuracy, precision, recall, F1 Score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) and loss curve. The model scored prediction accuracy of 82%, precision score of 0.83, recall score of 0.83, F1 score of 0.82, cross-validation score of 0.82 (± 0.10), One-vs-One ROC AUC score of 0.74, and One-vs-Rest ROC AUC score of 0.75 for each label. Our results indicate the model’s high prediction ability. The model provides a robust decision-making process for delivering correct elicitation techniques and lowering the risk of project failure. The implications of this study can be used to promote the automatization of the elicitation technique selection process, thereby enhancing current required elicitation industry practices.

Teknik Elisitasi Kebutuhan Perangkat Lunak: Literatur Review

The selection of software requirements elicitation techniques is very important for organizations as the first step in the software development process. This study is motivated by the existence of problems, where the organization does not understand the type of software being developed, so it is difficult to determine the right need elicitation technique. In this study, a literature review was used by collecting existing studies. Used 17 studies related to the discussion of elicitation techniques used. This study aims to review previous studies so as to produce recommendations for software requirements elicitation techniques. Based on the study, it can be concluded that interview, prototyping and JAD are most often used in software projects. In addition, for the small-medium scale software projects, more use of interviews, JAD, and ERD-based specifications. Meanwhile, the large-scale software projects involve more stakeholders with elicitation techniques such as group discussions, interviews, and parallel discussions to find joint solutions.

A Novel Framework for Selecting Elicitation Technique based on Attribute Mapping

The software development process is completely based on the requirements of stakeholders. If the requirements of stakeholders are being integrated into the proposed system, then it can be assumed that the end product is going to be optimal and successful. To achieve a successful product, different Requirement Elicitation Techniques (RET) are being practiced. The selection of a suitable RET is based on the nature of the product being developed. So, a single RET doesn’t fit all products. In this paper, we differentiate all RETs from each other which makes it easier for an analyst to choose suitable RET from the available ones. We further designed a novel mapping framework that extracts the best suited RET to any software based on its attributes. We have further implemented the proposed framework by using an online vehicle booking system as a running example.

Stocks Saving Simulation based on Historical Data Web-based

This study aims to simulate the calculation of saving stocks based on historical data for the past 10 years for the period January 2010 - January 2020, because saving simulations based on historical data are still very rare, so a simulation application for saving stock calculations based on historical data is made that can help customers. investors in simulating the calculation of saving stocks so that it can be used as learning to determine how to save the right way that can produce a good return. This application is created using a waterfall model. From the application made, it is expected to know the good return results of the 10 issuers used in this study, and in making basic applications on user requirements obtained through several respondents through online questionnaires and processed with requirement elicitation techniques. With the application of a stock saving calculation simulation application, it is hoped that it can be a lesson for investors in saving stocks and can also be a lesson for potential investors and can also make it easier for investors to do calculations because the calculation process is computerized.

Elicitation of functional requirements from the application programming interface documentation for functional testing

We address a common problem in this paper. The only available documentation for a computer program consists of a user API documentation while we need to identify functional requirements and build test suite to test them. We describe a technique for functional requirements elicitation from the user API documentation. Requirements management tool Requality is exploited in this technique. The tool has been used in several industrial software verification projects.

A Tacit-Knowledge-Based Requirements Elicitation Model Supporting COVID-19 Context

Effective software requirements elicitation plays a vital role in the success or failure of a project. However, ambiguity in the requirement’s statements indicate the presence of a tacit knowledge, which ultimately act as a root cause of critical complications in later stages of software development as user’s needs might remain hidden. Additionally, the existence of numerous stakeholders escalates the problem as their perceptions may contrast mainly due to their experiences and roles in a specific application domain. Hence, witlessness of relevant stakeholder(s) and ambiguous requirements cause the compromise for a product quality. Eventually, it paves the way towards the failure of a project. Furthermore, COVID-19 has affected all walks of life, more specifically requirements elicitation process as it heavily depends on human-to-human interaction. Motivated by this, current study aims at identifying the requirements elicitation techniques and challenges through a systematic literature review protocol. Furthermore, we have performed an exploratory study to identify the traditional elicitation techniques that can be used specifically for eliciting the tacit requirements. Additionally, we validate the top 15 critical challenges in a normal and pandemic scenario. To validate the result’s authenticity and legitimacy, appropriate statistical tests have been applied on the obtained results. Based on the attained results, it is observed that transfer of tacit knowledge remains a most crucial challenge. To effectively handle the tacit knowledge challenge, we propose a novel conceptual model supporting COVID-19 context. Similarly, we employ expert-validation mechanism for empirically evaluation of the proposed conceptual model. Moreover, the current study provides the guidelines for the practitioners to mitigate the highlighted effects on the requirements elicitation process during current pandemic time. Finally, we believe that proposed conceptual model supports the practitioners in effectively gathering the tacit-knowledge based requirements in the COVID-19 context.

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.

Fuzzy-soft set approach for ranking the functional requirements of software

Software requirements are the need of the stakeholders which are determined by the requirements elicitation techniques. Different fuzzy based methods have been developed to select the software requirements based on the ranking order so that high priority requirements can be implemented during the development process. Based on our review, we found that in these methods’ prior information about the data such as grades of membership during the computation is required and these methods are also incompatible with the parameterization tools. To address this issue, we proposed an approach for ranking the functional requirements of software using fuzzy-soft set theory. The relative deviation between counts of non-functional requirements has been used to construct the fuzzy-soft sets. The weights of the non-functional requirements and the ranking order of the functional requirements are computed from fuzzy soft-set derived from raw data in which no prior information about data is required. An example is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed approach.

Requirements Elicitation for an Assistance System for Complexity Management in Product Development of SMEs during COVID-19: A Case Study

Technological progress, upcoming cyber-physical systems, and limited resources confront small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with the challenge of complexity management in product development projects spanning over the entire product lifecycle. SMEs require a solution for documenting and analyzing the functional relationships between multiple domains such as products, software, and processes. The German research project FuPEP “Funktionsorientiertes Komplexitätsmanagement in allen Phasen der Produktentstehung” aims to address this issue by developing an assistance system that supports product developers by visualizing functional relationships. This paper presents the methodology and results of the assistance system’s requirements elicitation with two SMEs. Conducting the elicitation during a global pandemic, we discuss its application using specific techniques in light of COVID-19. We model problems and their effects regarding complexity management in product development in a system dynamics model. The most important requirements and use cases elicited are presented, and the requirements elicitation methodology and results are discussed. Additionally, we present a multilayer software architecture design of the assistance system. Our case study suggests a relationship between fear of a missing project focus among project participants and the restriction of requirements elicitation techniques to those possible via web conferencing tools.

ERequirement Elicitation Techniques for a C-Programming Learning Application

Requirement elicitation is a part of the application development process which determines the functional and non-functional requirements of the application. This study has elicited the requirements of a programming learning application by using several requirement elicitation techniques. The purpose of the application is to assist novice programmers in learning C language programming. The requirement elicitation was done by using qualitative approaches in a triangulation strategy. The triangulation involved literature reviews on related existing C-programming applications and semi-structured interviews with five expert programming lecturers in Malaysian Polytechnic. The requirement elicitation has identified an important approach of a programming learning application which is the programming visualization to help novices understand the program execution behaviour better. It has determined that the application should visualize the variable contents and program execution steps as its functional requirements. Meanwhile, the non-functional requirement of the application is that the application should be designed to be a simple IDE-based application since it is targeting the novices. The finding from this requirement elicitation is essential in determining important functions to be available in the developed application and how it is supposed to be implemented. This application could enhance programming skills of the students and prepare them to be competent programmers for the future industrial demand.

Requirements Elicitation Techniques in Mobile Applications

The common view of requirements engineering consists of requirement elicitation, specification, validation, and evolution. Requirement elicitation is a significant stage to assure the quality of the requirement documentations and would affect the project success or failure. There are different techniques to elicit the requirements. Each technique has its advantages and disadvantages. Thus, it is important to adopt more than one kind of technique to describe a system clearly from different viewpoints. This study prospected some of the research papers in the same field to display the requirements elicitation techniques that are used in developing mobile applications from a variety of research disciplines. It suggests some requirements elicitation concepts to guide software engineers in selecting the techniques according to customers' needs and to show the common challenges that they face.

An Approach for Selecting the Suitable Requirement Elicitation Technique

Requirements elicitation is an initial phase in software development. In this phase, requirements engineers gather the requirements of the software under development from users, stakeholders and customers. The techniques used for gathering requirements have a big influence on the quality of requirements and the success of project. Many requirements elicitation techniques (RET) such as: interview, prototype and observation can be used for requirements gathering process. However, one technique is not suitable for all different projects. Usually requirement engineers select the RET based on personal preferences and assumptions such as; this is the only technique which they know. However, this subjective decision can result in using inappropriate RET. Using unsuitable RET may decrease the quality of elicited requirements. Even though researchers have proposed many techniques for elicitation, one of the challenging issues is to choose the suitable RET for specific situations. The purpose of this paper is to help requirement engineers to choose suitable RET. To do that firstly, we identify factors that affect in selecting RET. Secondly, an approach to select suitable RET is proposed. Thirdly, a prototype is developed to help requirements engineers and to ease the process of selectingelicitation technique. Lastly, experts evaluate the proposed approach and the prototype.

Técnicas de elicitação de requisitos no desenvolvimento de software: uma revisão sistemática da literatura

Introdução: A elicitação de requisitos (ER) é uma tarefa difícil na qual é necessário lidar com ambiguidade de informações, dados incompletos e inconsistentes. Ela busca descobrir e entender o real problema e as necessidades dos usuários. O sucesso do desenvolvimento de software depende da elicitação correta dos requisitos, e a qualidade deles é influenciada pelas técnicas usadas. Dentro deste contexto, o objetivo desta pesquisa é identificar as técnicas de ER mais citadas na literatura em projetos de desenvolvimento de software. Método: Foi realizada uma revisão sistemática da literatura, que analisou 61 artigos da base de dados Scopus. Resultados: Foram identificadas as 10 técnicas de ER mais citadas na literatura. A classificação dessas técnicas mostrou que aquelas obtidas pelo envolvimento de grupos de stakeholders foram as menos citadas. Conclusão: A pesquisa identificou a oportunidade e relevância para o desenvolvimento de pesquisa acadêmica descritiva ou confirmatória sobre técnicas de ER baseadas na interação entre grupos de usuários e membros da equipe de desenvolvimento de software.

Economical Requirements Elicitation Techniques During COVID-19: A Systematic Literature Review

Requirements elicitation is a fundamental phase of software development in which an analyst discovers the needs of different stakeholders and transforms them into requirements. This phase is cost- and time-intensive, and a project may fail if there are excessive costs and schedule overruns. COVID-19 has affected the software industry by reducing interactions between developers and customers. Such a lack of interaction is a key reason for the failure of software projects. Projects can also fail when customers do not know precisely what they want. Furthermore, selecting the unsuitable elicitation technique can also cause project failure. The present study, therefore, aimed to identify which requirements elicitation technique is the most cost-effective for large-scale projects when time to market is a critical issue or when the customer is not available. To that end, we conducted a systematic literature review on requirements elicitation techniques. Most primary studies identified introspection as the best technique, followed by survey and brainstorming. This finding suggests that introspection should be the first choice of elicitation technique, especially when the customer is not available or the project has strict time and cost constraints. Moreover, introspection should also be used as the starting point in the elicitation process of a large-scale project, and all known requirements should be elicited using this technique.

Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Selection of Requirements Elicitation Techniques based on the Best-Worst Method

During requirements elicitation stage, requirements engineers gather system requirements and drive stakeholders to convey needs and desired software functionality. The elicitation techniques used to acquire software requirements significantly impact the quality of elicited requirements. Several elicitation techniques have been proposed for the Requirement Engineering (RE) process; however, these techniques are rarely used in reality due to a lack of empirical and relative appraisals to assist software team members in deciding on the most appropriate technique. Re-quirement engineers encounter difficulty in deciding the suitable elicitation technique to adopt for a certain software project. This difficulty is due to a lack of knowledge regarding the available elicitation techniques, their efficacy, and how appropriate they are for a certain project. According to the literature, requirements engineering processes benefit from the use of Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) approaches within particular contexts. An optimal structure is constitutionally presented within the area of the requirements engineering process; hence, the demonstra-tion of a robust decision-making method in the requirements engineering process should motivate a higher level of satisfaction with software projects developed in this way. This study proposes an approach for using the MCDM method in the requirements engineering process. The study contains a model for investigating the selection of an appropriate elicitation technique based on a decision-making method, namely, the Best-Worst Method (BWM). The findings of the proposed model demonstrate the BWM’s power in solving complex decision problems involving several criteria and alternatives.