A study of requirements elicitation and validation within an industrial environment is reported The key features in this part of the requirements process are: scenarios, (1.-; the prime means of elicitation; identification of domain objects, to capture the language of the domain and Fagan inspections for scenario validation by stakeholders. The process has been evaluated from both the requirements engineer s perspective and the viewpoint of the various stakeholders. The findings highlight a number of issues, both positive and negative, which are discuss ed. The deficiencies identified have stimulated our research. In particular, it is our contention, that requirements documentation needs to break away from the fixation with purely textual documents to ones that are media rich. Examples of this research, such as our hypermedia Scenario Manager, will be described 1: Introduction Increasing stakeholder involvement in the exploration and generation of system requirements is a recurring theme through much of the requirements engineering literature. Proponents of such a view often present this as an axiom for improving the quality of requirement". However, in reality this is an area where there is more theory than reported practice. An opportunity to redress this balance presented itself early in 1993. At this time one of Philips' professional organisations was beginning the development of a new system and, as part of this, was pioneering the use of an object oriented method, specifically, OOSE (Object Oriented Software Engineering) [Jacobson 92]. At the time OOSE was one of the few tool supported 00 methods using scenarios (which are referred to as use-cases by Jacobson) and their inclusion was one of its prime attractions. We note that other 00 methods e.g. [Booch 93], [Rumbaugh 94] have 0-8186-7017-7/95 $04.00 © 1995 IEEE 10 recently adopted use-cases. In addition to the use of scenarios the requirements generation process also included elicitation of domain objects and the validation of scenarios by stakeholders using Fagan inspections (Fagan 76]. We were therefore afforded an excellent opportunity to observe this process, how it evolved over 18 months and to capture the views of stakeholders and requirements engineers regarding their participation. This evaluation forms the focus of the first part of this paper.In the second part of the paper we briefly describe ideas and aspects of our research that have been stimulated by the case study. In particular, we consider the use of hypermedia for requirements documentation and its use in representing scenarios. 2: Case studyThe new system being developed is the software for a range of radiotherapy machines. These are commercial products aimed at the professional medical market. This software is to perform system control, system monitoring and provide an interface to operators and service engineers. A number of case-studies examining the use of scenarios have been performed, some of the more recent are: [Dardenne 93], [potts 94], [McDaniels 94] & [Kyng 94]. This paper g...
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.