Lecture # 17 Requirement Elicitation

Requirement Elicitation
Objectives
• Understand Requirement Elicitation
• Understand information that should be gathered in Requirement Elicitation
What is Requirement Elicitation?
It is the name given to activities involved in discovering requirements of the system
It involves learning about the problem to be solved through brainstorming and questioning. It involves identifying who the actual users are, what are their needs and what constraints. Dimensions of Information Gathered in Elicitation
The information that combines to form the requirements of the system have at least four dimensions and requirement engineer must gain understanding of them
These include
1. Understanding Application domain
2. Understanding The Problem
3. Understanding The Business
4. Understanding The needs and constraints of stakeholders
Understanding Application Domain:
This involves gaining general knowledge about the application domain. For example, when you are making a sales system for an Asset Management Firm you must have a general idea of what is asset management and how various products are sold.
Problem Understanding
The general concepts and ideas gained should be specialized and the details of specific customer problem where the system is going to be applied must be understood. For example after having an idea of how financial products are generally sold, you must extend the knowledge by gaining information about how the company for which you are developing solution sells the products
Business Understanding
This involves gaining knowledge of organization’s goals and how the system will contribute to the achievement of goals. It also involves studying and understanding the environment in which the system will function in order to identify the other systems with which a system will interact. Let’s take the example of asset management firm again. A requirement engineer must have gain information about the sales system will contribute towards the achievement of organizational goals. The goal of a company may be to increase sales by providing sales team with more and more time to spend with customer. In addition, the company has its own email server through which sales team send follow up emails to customers. These two items will influence the solution that will be proposed and if these are overlooked then the final output may not be very useful/satisfactory for the client
Understanding the needs and constraints of stakeholders
Finally, it is very important to take detailed information from stakeholder regarding their actual needs and their expectation about how the system will support their work. It also involves getting details of processes they perform and how they use the existing systems use to perform those processes.