requirements elicitation techniques,selection and effectiveness

WXGC 6108 REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION AND ANALYSIS SEM 1 2008/2009 of 8 ENDEAVOUR 2: CRITICAL ANALYSIS REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION TECHNIQUES, THEIR SELECTION AND EFFECTIVENESS JANANATUL AKMAL BINTI MUHD TALIB. WGC080006 Submitted on: 22 September 2008

WXGC 6108 REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION AND ANALYSIS SEMESTER 1 SESSION 2008

FACULTY OF COMPUTER SCIENCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

ENDEAVOUR 2: CRITICAL ANALYSIS

REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION TECHNIQUES, THEIR SELECTION AND EFFECTIVENESS

Written By: Jananatul Akmal Binti Muhd Talib

WGC080006

Submitted On: 22 September 2008


Before beginning with developing a system, requirements need to be

captured properly. Reason being is to make sure that the developers really serve

what the users want. Many large projects fail because of inadequate

requirements [3]. However, getting and understanding requirements would be a

challenging task. There are many techniques listed in books and articles. Yet, to

choose the best one is not easy. Several aspects need to be considered during

selection which will reflect the effectiveness of the requirements elicitation. Many

researches have come out with their own research work and hypothesis in order

to evaluate and determine the best techniques to facilitate requirements

elicitation. This paper will describe on which techniques for requirements

elicitation are frequently used. It will also touches on what are the possible ways

to select appropriate techniques in a given situation. Last but not least, an

overview on the importance of creativity in requirements engineering will also

being discussed. All these three issues will be described by analyzing four

articles written by the analysts and experts who have adequate background in

requirements engineering field.

Hickey and Davis (2003) give an overview of requirements elicitation

techniques and how to select appropriate techniques. They attempt to inform that

out of those numbers of elicitation techniques, analysts do not know how or when

to apply them [1]. They are referring to the beginners or so called less

experienced analysts. Thus, they believe that analysts with extensive experience

seem to be more successful than less experienced analysts in uncovering the

user needs [1]. Experience does counts. In their article, they demonstrated on

how experts select elicitation techniques based on a variety of situational

assessments [1]. They are very confident that experts can do better and able to

improve user’s satisfaction on the products created by the software industry [1].

However, situations might vary from one domain to another. Not all the times a

certain technique will be valid for a particular scenario. In many other domains,


researchers acknowledge that some tactics are more effective than others in

certain contexts [2].

At the beginning, Hickey and Davis (2003) tried to emphasis the success

or failure of a system development effort depends heavily on the quality of the

requirements [1]. Since they believed that experts can do better in assuring the

requirements qualities, thus, the industry should find ways of transferring these

experts’ knowledge of elicitation technique selection to the less experienced [1].

By interviewing nine expert analysts, they tried to understand how each expert

performs elicitation. However, this research not considered as ‘a whole’ because

they only analyze data that come out from only nine experts. They concluded that

it may not be representative of all expert analysts and provide sufficient coverage

of all situations and techniques [1]. They would need more research in order to

understand the relationship between different system contexts and technique

selection [2].

Selection of requirements elicitation techniques would be easier by

selecting based on the type of information that the analyst is trying to find [2].

Hickey and Davis (2003) concluded; expert analysts may simply select the

technique they are most comfortable with, and do not either consciously or

subconsciously select a technique from the large set of available techniques [1].

The possibility that might occur when the experts are too comfortable with their

own default techniques is that, it will limit the analysis results. But, in this article,

the authors did solve this probability by mentioning that the experts select

techniques as a result of both the information they are trying to find and the

conditions necessary to conduct the technique [2].

Hickey and Davis (2003) also tried to relate the selection of techniques

with the scenarios and situations. Based on the research results, they found out

that Collaborative Sessions are seen by most to be a standard or default


approach to eliciting requirements [1]. This technique is more effective when

stakeholders participate actively in the requirements process activities [5]. When

there are a large, diverse, and autonomous set of stakeholders exists, this

technique seems to be handy [1]. Distances or geographic distribution should not

be the stopping point for a successful collaborative session. Today’s technology

shall conduct the group session in a distributed manner [1]. However, it is

important to make sure that all participants do know how to utilize the available

tools in order to maximize the effectiveness of this technique. Collaborative

Session would depend on the availability of the technology used.

Besides that, Interviews are also being used widely. Other than gathering

initial background information, Hickey and Davis (2003) also stated that this

technique is primarily used to obtain new information, or to uncover conflicts or

politics [1]. It seems like political issues encourage inefficiency in requirements

elicitation. Referring to their research, most of the experts uses this technique

whenever heavy politics are present, to ensure that the group session does not

self destruct [1]. Cohene and Easterbrook (2005) did also mention that direct

interviews are a common method in requirements elicitation [2]. Interviews have

the potential to elicit a large amount of information. They are valuable for gaining

a global understanding of the stakeholders’ behaviors and environments [2].

However, this technique might leads to problems such as time consuming and

may result in insufficient, irrelevant or invalid data. That’s why they come out with

a research to re-examine the methodology of interview design and to determine

how various contextual factors affect the success of interviews in requirements

engineering [2]. According to Goguen and Linde (1993), Interviews can be used

in an extraordinary variety of domains, and are often quite successful [3]. They

discussed three types of interviews techniques such as questionnaires, open

ended interviews, and focus groups [3].


Speaking about questionnaires, Hickey and Davis (2003) showed a

surprising result that, very few experts uses this technique. This method has the

benefit of appearing scientific, because it uses statistical analysis [3]. Anyhow,

further reading on this method chapter, Goguen and Linde (1993) stated the

problem that might relate to the reason why most of the experts interviewed by

Hickey and Davis (2003) in their thesis writing. There are some validity

assurance issues by having the same words repeated to subjects in each

interview, because these words will mean different things to different people in

different contexts [3].

Ethnography, in the other hand, was claimed as extremely effective [1] by

the analysis experts. This technique is also suggested as a good idea to uncover

basic aspects of social order, such as the basic category systems used by

members, the division into social groups, the goals of various social groups,

typical patterns of work, how current technology is used, etc [3]. Speaking about

technology used, some of the experts implied that observation of users should

always be done when they are available and there is an existing system [1]. All in

all, many of the analysts seemed to acknowledge that stakeholders should be

observed when feasible [1].

Visual ‘speaks’ louder than words. In this case, models would play a

critical role in requirements elicitation. According to Hickey and Davis (2003), more analysts are now seeing modeling as a means to facilitate communication,

uncover missing information, organize information gathered from other elicitation

techniques, and uncover inconsistencies [1]. These four aspects are always true

and this is the reason why modeling should be put into practice. To support this,

they included in their summary and conclusion regarding creation of models and

its importance. It is like an aid for the analysts in fully comprehending a situation

and in communicating with the stakeholders [1].


Other than just following what are the available requirements elicitation

techniques listed by the experts, Maiden and Gitzikis (2001) was also trying to

highlight the importance of creativity in requirement engineering process. They

believed that the question on what qualities a product should have and how to

determine these requirements for new generations of products can be answered

by practicing creativity approaches. They showed disappointment on how

analysts neglect this important trend [4]. They claimed that, most RE activities

are exploratory; which they acquire and discover requirements and knowledge

about the problem domain [4]. In order to demonstrate the role of creativity in

requirements engineering, Maiden and Gitzikis (2001) they encourage creative

thinking by holding workshops. Several experts are invited to the workshop and

they found out that this activity shall stimulate inspirations and ideas among the

participants. User requirements can be captured in a fun better way. People work

together in dynamically designed groups to generate new ideas [4]. Later, they

verify the ideas by asking stakeholders to assess, rank, and categorize new

ideas in different ways [4]. However, this article doesn’t support the importance of

creativity enough. They still need some feedbacks about their creative RE

process and more research need to be made in the future.

Sometimes the experienced and less experienced analysts need to work

together. New analysts with fresh minds might have new ideas and opinions that

might be useful for the experienced analysts. With the helps of the new analysts,

they might complete each other in a unique way and shall achieve a better user

requirements analysis. While Collaborative Session claimed to be the most

effective technique of all, it is easy to lose the information by ignoring or not

realizing to respond to requests for information from email or other sources [5].

The resolution time will be wasted. It will cause inefficiency in terms of time line

and scheduling. Interviews will always work. Effective face-to-face

communication needs to be practiced. If an analyst can master this technique,

reading the gestures and body language, it will result to a high quality


requirements elicitation. As for ethnography, this technique might not be always

worked for all requirements, especially when it comes to a development of a new

system. Most of the experts that were being interviewed would have engineered

legacy systems that are why majority of them stated that this technique is the

most efficient. However, Hickey and Davis (2003) did mentioned that they

research results may not provide sufficient coverage of all situations and

techniques [1]. Their interviews may have biased the responses of the given

subjects [1] too. Basically, these two points have already being mentioned in the

discussion. No doubt, modeling is important. Perhaps, this technique shall

courage creativity even more during requirements elicitation. Thinking outside

the box must be strongly practiced to maximize the quality of product. It is not

just fun to do but it can decrease the level of tension when the thinking gets too

restricted by a certain policy etc.

The best part about Hickey and Davis (2003) paper writing is that, they

included some general advice from the experts, to make it more precise and

useful. The first advice that comes in the list is identifying users and other

stakeholders. This statement shows that, from the stakeholders, analysts will get

requirements, and from the requirements, there would be scenarios created and

from the scenarios, techniques can be selected. In a nutshell, analysts must not

see and think in their own perspective only. Thus, there is no rule of thumb for

the best requirement elicitation techniques allocated for a certain requirement.

Expertise and experience is just a learning curve. It’s the stakeholders and their

surroundings determine it all.


REFERENCE

1. Hickey, A.M, and A.M. Davis, (2003): Elicitation Technique Selection: How Do Experts Do It? In: Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ‘03), Monterey Bay, USA 2003. pp .169-178.

2. Cohene, T., S. Easterbrook (2005): Contextual Risk Analysis for Interview

Design. In: Proceedings of the 2005 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’05), Paris, France 2005. pp. 95-104.

3. Goguen, J. and C. Linde (1993): Techniques for Requirements Elicitation.

In: Proceedings of the First IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ‘93), San Diego, USA 1993. pp. 152-164.

4. Maiden, N. and A. Gizikis (2001): Where Do Requirements Come From?

IEEE Software 18, 5(Sept./Oct. 2001). pp. 10-12.

5. Lloyd, W.J., M.B. Rosson, J.D. Arthur (2002): Effectiveness of Elicitation Techniques in Distributed Requirements Engineering. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Joint International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’02), Essen, Germany 2002. pp. 311-318.

requirements elicitation techniques,selection and effectiveness

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