The state-of-practice in requirements elicitation: an extended interview study at 12 companies

Abstract

Context.Requirements engineering remains a discipline that is faced with a large number of challenges, including the implementation of a requirements elicitation process in industry. Although several proposals have been suggested by researchers and academics, little is known of the practices that are actually followed in industry.Objective. We investigate the state-of-practice with respect to requirements elicitation, by closely examining practitioners' current practices. To this aim, we focus on the techniques that are used in industry, the roles that requirements elicitation involves, and the challenges that the requirements elicitation process is faced with. Method.We conducted an interview-based survey study involving 24 practitioners from 12 different Swedish IT companies. We recorded the interviews and analysed these recordings by using quantitative and qualitative methods.Results. We found that group interaction techniques, including meetings and workshops, are the most popular type of elicitation techniques that are employed by the practitioners, except in the case of small projects. Additionally, practitioners tend to use a variety of elicitation techniques in each project. We noted that customers are frequently involved in the elicitation process, except in the case of market-driven organizations. Technical staff (for example, developers and architects) are more frequently involved in the elicitation process compared to the involvement of business or strategic staff. Finally, we identified a number of challenges with respect to stakeholders. These challenges include difficulties in understanding and prioritizing their needs. Further, it was noted that requirements instability (i.e., caused by changing needs or priorities) was a predominant challenge. These observations need to be interpreted in the context of the study. Conclusion.The relevant observations regarding the survey participants' experiences should be of interest to the industry; experiences that should be analysed in the practitioners' context. Researchers may find evidence for the use of academic results in practice, thereby inspiring future theoretical work, as well as further empirical studies in the same area.

How do requirements evolve during elicitation? An empirical study combining interviews and app store analysis

“…Another stream of works on early requirements elicitation is concerned with empirical studies on interviews and focus groups. These are the most common techniques used by companies, as shown by the NaPiRE survey [3], and by the recent study by Paolmares et al [4]. Hadar et al [17] show the double-sided impact of the domain knowledge of the analyst on the interview process.…”

“…With respect to the literature on early requirements evolution, our work is among the first ones that considers requirements elicitation performed with traditional interviews, which are extremely common in practice [3,4,22]. The closest work to ours is the contribution of Hayes et al [34], focusing on prerequirements information.…”

“…Differently from the case of categories, not all the analysts added new roles to their stories, but still a large number did it (22 analysts over 30). 6 new roles emerged from the analysis, namely, in order of frequency, attendee (16), visitor (8), user (7) 4 , consultant (3), system administrator (2), and investor (1). Table 7 reports descriptive statistics on new roles (excluding system administrators and investors that appear just once in the stories of 2 and 1 analysts, respectively).…”

“…Requirements are elicited from the customer and other stakeholders through an iterative process of interviews, prototyping, and other interactive sessions [1][2][3][4]. The iterations transform the initial ideas of the customer into more explicit needs, normally expressed in the form of a requirements document to be used for system specification.…”

“…Previous literature in requirements engineering (RE) individually studied the different elicitation phases and supporting techniques. Inquisitive elicitation strategies, such as interviews and focus groups, are recognised as extremely common in industrial practice [3,4]. Some researchers studied the impact of domain knowledge [17,18], communication issues [16,19,20] and other factors [21][22][23] on the success of these strategies.…”