A situational method engineering approach to requirements elicitation workshops in the software development process

Abstract

The elicitation of requirements for software systems is one of the most critical and complex activities within the development lifecycle. Although the subject has received some degree of attention in the research literature, there remains a need for situational methods and processes that can be easily utilized by the majority of practitioners in typical projects. In this paper we present a flexible yet systematic approach to the early stages of requirements elicitation in software development, based on collaborative workshops and the construction of a lightweight situational method, within a general process framework. The research provides practitioners with an approach to requirements elicitation that can be readily applied to real-world projects in order to improve both the process and the results. The work also offers researchers an example of how lightweight situational method engineering can be applied to very practical activities and situations in the software process. defined as the operations related to the acquisition and elaboration of goals, constraints, and features for proposed software-based systems by means of investigation, exploration, and analysis. Furthermore, it is generally understood and accepted that requirements are 'elicited' rather than just captured or collected. This implies the discovery, development, and creativity elements of the process. Similarly, Hickey and Davis (2003) have defined requirements elicitation as 'learning, uncovering, extracting, surfacing, and/or discovering the needs of customers, users, and other potential stakeholders'.

Overcoming barriers to participation during requirements elicitation

“…This approach is consistent with existing studies of elicitation characteristics (such as Coughlan et al, 2003;Coulin et al, 2006;Hanisch and Corbitt, 2007) and evaluation of the management of ISs (such as Franz et al, 1991;Lowe et al, 2004). In these studies, insights into the management of ISs have been advanced through the use of literature to conceptualise frameworks for use in empirical studies within a case company to complement literature and highlight challenges for practice.…”

“…These methods are selected according to: familiarity of the method to analysts and participants, preference to methods, conformance to methodology adopted for elicitation and analyst's mind-set, and relevance to situation (Hickey and Davis, 2004). Procedural prompts and pragmatic considerations are also important aspects of method engineering (Aranda et al, 2010;Mich et al, 2005;Pitts and Browne, 2007;Coulin et al, 2006;Tsumaki and Tamai, 2006).…”

“…Requirements elicitation (RE) is widely accepted as critical to the front-end of new product development and involves learning, defining, uncovering, extracting, discovering, acquiring and elaborating on the needs of customers, end-users, and other potential stakeholders (Darke and Shanks, 1997;Cooper et al, 1999;Hickey and Davis, 2004;Zowghi and Coulin, 2005;Coulin et al, 2006;Gambhir, 2001;Pitts and Browne, 2007;Dieste et al, 2008;Laporti et al, 2009;Fuentes-Fernández et al, 2010). However, participation of stakeholders in RE is a practice that has to deal with three important challenges: stakeholder uncertainty and inability to communicate needs, evolving requirements during the life of projects and poor information gathering techniques applied by analysts (Flynn and Jazi, 1998;Blyth, 1998;Pitts and Browne, 2007).…”

A Framework for the Elicitation and Analysis of Information Technology Service Requirements and Their Alignment with Enterprise Business Goals

“…In earlier work we have developed a collaborative and situational method (OUTSET) [9] and its supporting tool (MUSTER) [10], specifically for requirements elicitation workshops, which utilizes, extends, and demonstrates a successful application of intelligent technologies for Computer Aided Software Engineering and Computer Aided Method Engineering. In this project we intend to initially apply OUTSET and MUSTER to IT service requirements elicitation and if needed, extend it to cater for specific characteristics of IT services.…”

Quality of semantic standards

“…For our purposes, we decided to embrace the notion of situational method engineering (Brinkkemper, 1996;Brinkkemper, 1998;Coulin, 2006), implying the configuration of an approach tuned to the project at hand. We assemble our requirements gathering process using method fragments from three well-known requirements engineering methods: QFD, KAOS, and Volere.…”