Selecting Software Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Nowadays, software developers recurrently have to decide how to elicit requirements information from product development stakeholders. Even though they appreciate the importance of requirements elicitation, they still select techniques subjectively. This is due to the fact that they have limited knowledge of how many techniques are currently available and to that the information available about existing elicitation techniques is mostly descriptive and there is hardly any pragmatic or prescriptive information. This book addresses how to select the best requirements elicitation techniques at any time in the process. To this, it proposes a framework with three components: the contextual attributes affecting technique effectiveness; adequacy of the elicitation techniques, that is, prescriptions on use for the attribute values; and selection procedures that suggest, after determining the contextual situation, techniques for use in the next elicitation session subject to technique adequacy. In sum, this book provides a practical insight to help developers systematically and objectively select requirements elicitation techniques for a software project.