REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION

TECHNIQUES

Requirements elicitation is the practice of collecting

the requirements of a system from users, customers
and other stakeholders. The practice is also sometimes
referred to as requirements gathering.
Techniques for gathering requirements
Stakeholder Analysis

Brainstorming

One On One Interview

Group Interview

Document Analysis

Focus Group

Interface Analysis

Observation Social Analysis

Prototyping
Techniques for gathering requirements
Facilitated sessions

Joint Application Development (JAD)

Questionnaire

Survey

Use cases and scenarios (UCD)

Reused Requirements

Request for proposals (RFPs)

Reverse Engineering
 1- Stakeholder Analysis
Stakeholder analysis identifies
all the users and stakeholders
who may influence or be
impacted by the system. This
helps ensure that the needs of
all those involved are taken into
account
Benefits
1. Ensures that all relevant
stakeholders are considered
2. All important
stakeholders are captured,
and yet that irrelevant
actors are not included
Drawbacks
There is a danger that too much
time is spent on
identifying roles and relationships.
 2- Brainstorming
It is utilized in requirements elicitation
to gather good number of ideas from a
Basic Rules
group of people. Usually brainstorming 1. Start out by clearly
is used in identifying all possible stating the objective of
solutions to problems and simplifies the the brainstorming
detail of opportunities. session.
2. Generate as may ideas as
possible.
3. Let your imagination.
4. Do not allow criticism or
debate while you are
gathering information.
5. Once information is
gathered, reshape and
combine ideas.
2- Brainstorming
Benefits Risks
1. Generate a variety of
ideas in a short time 1. The risk of having a bad
session
2. Produce new and
creative ideas 2. Making staff scared to say
their ideas because they
were criticized in the session

3. Problems normally occur if

you only use traditional 
brainstorming techniques.
 3-One On One Interview
The most common technique for
gathering requirements is to sit
Benefits
down with the clients and ask
them what they need. The • Privacy of everyone
discussion should be planned
• in-depth a stakeholder’s
out ahead of time based on the
type of requirements you’re thoughts and get his or her
looking for point of view

Risks & Drawbacks

• Time Consuming
• Misunderstandings
 4- Group Interview
If there are more then one
person during interview usually
2 or 4 these people must be on
some level . Less time required.
Benefits
• we can get hidden requirements
• uncover a richer set of
requirements in a shorter period
of time
• Uncover ambiguities
Risks & Drawbacks
• Not relaxed environment
• Conflicts
• The allotted time have been
exhausted
 5-Facilitated sessions
In a facilitated session, you bring a larger
group (five or more) together for a common
purpose. In this case, you are trying to gather Benefits
a set of common requirements from the group
• Less Time
in a FASTER MANNER than if you were to
interview each of them separately. • Reach Group Of People
• Brainstorming sessions
(virtual or face-to-face)

Risks & Drawbacks

• More Expensive
• need for extra facilities to
allow for group work etc
• Handouts, readings
6-Joint Application Development (JAD)
JAD sessions are similar to general facilitated Benefits
sessions. However, the group typically stays in
the session until the session objectives are • group typically stays in
completed. For a requirements JAD session, the session until the
the participants stay in session until a session objectives are
complete set of requirements is completed
documented and agreed to. • participants stay in
session until a complete
set of requirements
• documented and agreed
to

Risks & Drawbacks

• takes time to build 

• more costly to build
 7- Questionnaire
Questionnaires are much more informal, and
they are good tools to gather requirements Benefits
from stakeholders in remote locations or
those who will have only minor input into the • Less cost
overall requirements. Questionnaires can also • Reach Large No of Peoples
be used when you have to gather input from • The responses are gathered
dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people. in a standardized way

Risks & Drawbacks

• Difficult filling for users

• participants may forget
important issues
• Stockholders may not be
willing to answer the
questions
 8- Survey
When gathering information from many Benefits
people: to many to interview with time
constraints and less budget: a questionnaire • Less cost
survey can be used. The survey insists the • Reach Large No of
users to choose from the given options agree / Peoples
disagree or rate something. Do not think that • A detailed critical
you can make a survey on your own but try to inspection 
add meaningful insight in it. A well designed
survey must give qualitative guidance for
characterizing the market. It should not be Risks & Drawbacks
utilized for prioritizing of requirements or
features. • Difficult filling for users
We observe by visiting the real site of the • participants may forget
project domain. important issues
• Stakeholders may not be
willing to answer the
questions
 Difference between questionnaire
and survey?
The Oxford dictionary defines them as quoted below:

survey:
1 a general view, examination, or description. 2 an investigation of the
opinions or experience of a group of people, based on a series of questions. 3
an act of surveying. 4 a map or report obtained by surveying. 

Questionnaire:
noun a set of printed questions, usually with a choice of answers, devised for a
survey or statistical study.
 9-Prototyping
Benefits
Prototyping is a relatively modern technique
for gathering requirements. In this approach, • prototypes can be ideal
you gather preliminary requirements that you reduce design risk
use to build an initial version of the solution — • it is more practical
a prototype. You show this to the client, who • Screen mock-ups
then gives you additional requirements. You • Using animation tools
change the application and cycle around with • provides an understanding
the client again. This repetitive process of functionality
continues until the product meets the critical
mass of business needs or for an agreed
number of iterations. Risks & Drawbacks

• takes time to build 

• more costly to build
• false sense of security
 10- Document Analysis
Document Analysis is an
important gathering technique.
Evaluating the documentation of a
present system can assist when
making AS-IS process documents
and also when driving the
Gap Analysis for scoping of the
migration projects.
Benefits
• validating the requirement
completeness.
• Chunks of information are mostly
buried in present documents
• A beginning point for
documenting all current
requirements.
Risks & Drawbacks
• Time Consuming
• Conflicts
• Exhausted
• Not Found Real Figures
 11-Interface Analysis
Interface for any software product will either be human or machine.
Integration with external devices and systems is another interface. The
user centric design approaches are quite effective to ensure that you
make usable software. Interface analysis- analyzing the touch points
with another external system- is vital to ensure that you do not overlook
requirements that are not instantly visible to the users.
 12- Focus Group
A focus group is actually gathering of
people who are customers or users
representatives for a product to gain its
feedback. The feedback can be collected
about opportunities, needs, and
problems to determine requirements or
it can be collected to refine and validate
the already elicited requirements.
Benefits
• Managed process with particular
participants
• refine and validate the already
elicited requirements
• Allows analyst to rapidly obtain a
wide variety of user views and
possibly a consensus.
Risks & Drawbacks
• following the crowd and some
people think that focus groups
are at best unproductive
• end up with is with least common
denominator features.
• Recruitment effort to
• Assemble groups. Dominant
participants may influence group
disproportionately
 13-Observation / Social Analysis
Social analysis is also known as
Observation. Observation is the method
of collecting requirements by observing
the people doing their normal work.
This method is generally used to find the
additional requirements needed by the
user, when the user is unable to explain
their expected requirements from the
new product and problems with the
existing product
Benefits
• The ability to record and
report all findings that are
true
• it is more practical
• no long calculation has to be
done
Risks & Drawbacks
• The viewer's or researcher's
own perception 
• few trials/studies/or objects
observed to make an end
conclusion
• results may contain human
error
 14- Use cases and scenarios
Use cases are basically stories that describe
how discrete processes work. The stories
include people (actors) and describe how the
solution works from a user perspective. Use
cases may be easier for the users to articulate,
although the use cases may need to be
distilled later into the more specific detailed
requirements.
Benefits
• provide the best return on
invested effort
• explain how that system will
be implemented
• Each use case provides a set
of scenarios that convey how
the system should interact

Risks & Drawbacks

• Poor identification of
structure and flow
• Time-consuming to generate
• Scenario management is
difficult
 15- Requirements Reuse
In the field of software engineering
reusing the requirements of the Benefits
existing system is common method of
requirements elicitation. Using the • Reused requirements
existing knowledge to develop the are already validated
new product has many advantages and analyzed thus
reducing the time of
that include low cost and less time.
testing
Though each product has their own
type of stake holders and users, there
is still number of situations that the Risks & Drawbacks
reusing of the requirements take
places • Some time proposed
product is completely
different form the
existing product
16- Request for proposals (RFPs)
If you are a vendor, you may receive
requirements through an RFP. This list
of requirements is there for you to
compare against your own capabilities to
determine how close a match you are to
the client’s needs.

The RFP presents preliminary

requirements for the commodity or
service, and may dictate to varying
degrees the exact structure and format
of the supplier's response. Effective RFPs
typically reflect the strategy and
short/long-term business objectives,
providing detailed insight upon which
suppliers will be able to offer a matching
perspective
17-Reverse Engineering
Is this a last resort or starting point? When a migration project
is not having enough documentation of the current system,
reverse engineering will determine what system does? It will
not determine what the thing went wrong with the system and
what a system must do?
A critical activity for any ERP implementation is gathering
business requirements

Often we spend too much time and effort focusing on

gathering requirements that do not support key business
results and then gloss over the key business activities because
of implementation time constraints.  Prioritizing business
results is an activity that we need to initiate before gather
requirements, not during fit/gap when expectations are
harder to manage and negotiate.
Effectiveness of method used
for Requirements Elicitation
 Selecting Appropriate Techniques
Interview JAD Question- Document Observation
naires Analysis
Type of As-is, As-is, As-is, As-is As-is
information improves, improves, improves
to-be to-be
Depth of info High High Medium Low Low
Breadth of info Low Medium High High Low
Info integration Low High Low Low Low
User involvement Medium High Low Low Low
Cost Medium Low- Low Low Low-medium
medium

As-is : understanding current system

Improves: identifies improvements
To-be: developing the new system 26