Extraction of viewpoints for eliciting customer's requirements based on analysis of specification change records

Abstract

Eliciting customer's requirements is the most important issue for a system integration project. Failure to elicit the customer's requirements can cause an enormous correction cost. However there are only a few practical, concrete guidelines to do.In this paper, we describe a method to extract viewpoints and checklists for eliciting customer's requirements more effectively based on analyzing specification change records. The flow of the method is 1) representing the records in an easy-readable format, 2) identifying the causes and the phases, 3) categorizing them, 4) putting a name to a category, namely a viewpoint and 5) deriving check-items for each viewpoint.We applied the method to 135 records from 4 system development cases, and we derived 39 checkitems in total. We found 78% of the specification change cases could have been prevented by only 10 check-items of requirements elicitation process. This result shows that the proposed method works effectively to extract the viewpoints for eliciting customer's requirements.

Customer Requirements Elicitation based on Social Network Service

“…Though a variety of methods have been suggested to measure users' influence in a social network, thus far, the superiority of one method compared to the others has not been verified. Therefore, in our study, the page rank algorithm 4 is chosen to calculate factor H, which is general and produces a similar output to other methods but is relatively easy to calculate [21]. The greater this factor is, the larger is the influence of the relevant user and the more influential are his/her opinions.…”

“…Because of the importance of customer requirements elicitation (CRE), various methods involving interviews, surveys, observations, and simulations under different scenarios have been proposed [4]. However, these methods still have the following limitations:  Limited number of target customers-Most of the aforementioned methods first choose a sample customer group and then collect the requirements.…”