Requirements Elicitation Challenges and Strategies for GSD Based Projects

Software Requirements (SR) are considered as the foundation for a supreme quality software development process and each step of the software development process is dependent and is related to the SR. Software requirements elicitation may be the most important area of requirements engineering and possibly of the entire software development process. There is a lot of human work required in the process of software requirements elicitation and software requirements classification and in cases where the requirements are huge in number, this requirements elicitation and classification process becomes tedious and is prone to errors. We propose a novel approach to automate Requirements Elicitation and Classification using an intelligent conversational chatbot. Utilizing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, the chatbot converses with stakeholders in Natural Language and elicits formal system requirements from the interaction, and subsequently classifies the elicited requirements into Functional and Non-functional system requirements.

This scientific article presents the results of a study focused on the current practices and future prospects of AI-tools usage, specifically large language models (LLMs), in software development (SD) processes within European IT companies. The Pan-European study covers 35 SD teams from all regions of Europe and consists of three sections: the first section explores the current adoption of AI-tools in software production, the second section addresses common challenges in LLMs implementation, and the third section provides a forecast of the tech future in AI-tools development for SD. The study reveals that AI-tools, particularly LLMs, have gained popularity and approbation in European IT companies for tasks related to software design and construction, coding, and software documentation. However, their usage for business and system analysis remains limited. Nevertheless, challenges such as resource constraints and organizational resistance are evident. The article also highlights the potential of AI-tools in the software development process, such as automating routine operations, speeding up work processes, and enhancing software product excellence. Moreover, the research examines the transformation of IT paradigms driven by AI-tools, leading to changes in the skill sets of software developers. Although the impact of LLMs on the software development industry is perceived as modest, experts anticipate significant changes in the next 10 years, including AI-tools integration into advanced IDEs, software project management systems, and product management tools. Ethical concerns about data ownership, information security and legal aspects of AI-tools usage are also discussed, with experts emphasizing the need for legal formalization and regulation in the AI domain. Overall, the study highlights the growing importance and potential of AI-tools in software development, as well as the need for careful consideration of challenges and ethical implications to fully leverage their benefits.

In silico studies allow the use of computer models to simulate the environment, object, and subject behavior of an experiment. They are valuable tools to support the quantitative analysis of the behavior of different types of projects because they allow the use of different techniques such as stochastic and analytical methods to evaluate the impact of project decisions without the real execution costs. Recently, in silico studies have been used to study distributed software development projects. In this paper, we present a simulation model defined by a set of variables that describe the dynamics of Distributed Software Development (DSD) projects. The assessment of our simulation model is based on a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) where we seek evidence, from primary studies published until October 2018, that the variables and relationships in our model do exist in actual DSD projects. We use a SLR as a validation mechanism. Our results are twofold. First, there is a gap of studies on some variables including knowledge expertise and task allocation strategy in distributed software development projects. And, second, there still is a lack of data to support results related to productivity, especially testing activities, on DSD projects. Despite the problem of lack of common terminology for reporting the results on DSD studies, we argue that we need more studies to be able to clearly infer the dynamics of the relationship between variables on distributed software development. Our study brings one step closer to fulfill this gap.

Requirements Engineering (RE) is a critical process in Software Engineering (SE) activities. RE helps stakeholders to manage requirements appropriately before dedicated requirements are used to design and implement software. The first stage in RE process is known as requirements elicitation whereby during elicitation, stakeholders will perform a set of activities to permit understanding in problem domain for respected scenario and hence proposing a set of established requirements in developing software. In elicitation, stakeholders need to collaborate and communicate in order to produce unambiguous requirements and create mutual agreement for software design and development. This can produce desired solution for all stakeholders. Soft issue is one of non-technical requirements that can associate with social presence, social interaction elements such as comfort, connectedness and motivation. This requirements need to be emphasized during RE process especially for a system that is categorized in Computer- Supported Collaboration Working (CSCW) domain. Users need CSCW domain system to carry out virtual communication, knowledge sharing via system's features. The aim of this paper is to carry out a preliminary study on RE process and requirements elicitation activities by identifying whether soft issues have been engaged in existing requirements elicitation process. Another aim is to compare stakeholders' roles based on selected articles. The method to investigate requirements elicitation process is done by identifying existing elicitation processes as well as involvement of stakeholders' collaboration during elicitation. According to the study, the comparison of existing requirements elicitation processes and comparison of job roles have been produced as a result in this paper.

In large projects, software developers struggle with two sources of complexity - the complexity of the code itself, and the complexity of the process of producing it. Both of these concerns have been subjected to considerable research investigation, and tools and techniques have been developed to help manage them. However, these solutions have generally been developed independently, making it difficult to deal with problems that inherently span both dimensions. We describe Augur, a visualization tool that supports distributed software development processes. Augur creates visual representations of both software artifacts and software development activities, and, crucially, allows developers to explore the relationship between them. Augur is designed not for managers, but for the developers participating in the software development process. We discuss some of the early results of informal evaluation with open source software developers. Our experiences to date suggest that combining views of artifacts and activities is both meaningful and valuable to software developers.

The requirements elicitation is considered as one of the most critical tasks performed during the whole requirements engineering process. The requirements elicitation frameworks define a systematic structured way to perform requirements elicitation task during software development projects. The requirements elicitation in global software development projects becomes a more challenging task due to the high diversity in its participants. The pre-elicitation processes can be customized to better plane the requirements elicitation process for global software development contexts. This article presents a structured hierarchy of pre-elicitation processes for global software development-based requirements elicitation frameworks. The presented pre-elicitation processes hierarchy can be customized to apply for traditional requirements elicitation frameworks used for inhouse software development contexts.

Effective software requirements elicitation plays a vital role in the success or failure of a project. However, ambiguity in the requirement’s statements indicate the presence of a tacit knowledge, which ultimately act as a root cause of critical complications in later stages of software development as user’s needs might remain hidden. Additionally, the existence of numerous stakeholders escalates the problem as their perceptions may contrast mainly due to their experiences and roles in a specific application domain. Hence, witlessness of relevant stakeholder(s) and ambiguous requirements cause the compromise for a product quality. Eventually, it paves the way towards the failure of a project. Furthermore, COVID-19 has affected all walks of life, more specifically requirements elicitation process as it heavily depends on human-to-human interaction. Motivated by this, current study aims at identifying the requirements elicitation techniques and challenges through a systematic literature review protocol. Furthermore, we have performed an exploratory study to identify the traditional elicitation techniques that can be used specifically for eliciting the tacit requirements. Additionally, we validate the top 15 critical challenges in a normal and pandemic scenario. To validate the result’s authenticity and legitimacy, appropriate statistical tests have been applied on the obtained results. Based on the attained results, it is observed that transfer of tacit knowledge remains a most crucial challenge. To effectively handle the tacit knowledge challenge, we propose a novel conceptual model supporting COVID-19 context. Similarly, we employ expert-validation mechanism for empirically evaluation of the proposed conceptual model. Moreover, the current study provides the guidelines for the practitioners to mitigate the highlighted effects on the requirements elicitation process during current pandemic time. Finally, we believe that proposed conceptual model supports the practitioners in effectively gathering the tacit-knowledge based requirements in the COVID-19 context.

Software development is the activity of creating a software system that when used, solves some unsolved problem. It consists many knowledge intensive processes, among which requirement elicitation process is perhaps the most critical for the success of the software system. The success or failure of the system is related to the quality of the elicitation process and to the method used for gathering user needs. This study examines combined approaches to identify and classify the requirements and investigates the importance of customer satisfaction in requirement elicitation for online bus reservation system. The context of this work is University Malaysia Pahang (UMP). The target audiences are public who uses bus services. A total 63 out of 70 questionnaire are answered by the people. To do this, the design of two types of questionnaires: conventional and Kano questionnaire is done and implemented to identify the correct requirements for the selected system and then to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches. This study found that, both conventional method and Kano model are suitable to find and classify the requirements, but for deeper understanding of requirements which have the greatest influence on the customer's satisfaction, Kano model is more effective, because Kano's method provides valuable help when trade-off is needed for designing the product development.

The current software engineering practices observed in the local software industry generally lacks the software metrics planning part. The specific planning required to improve the software practices, to gauge the productivity of the individuals, and productivity at different phases of software development life cycle (SDLC), is generally missing. These organizations do not have any planning to gauge and control the business development issues and improve their productivities. During development phase, most of these software houses do collect data about different aspects of the project like project planning, requirement specification, testing, and bugs found. However, these organizations, generally, do not understand the importance of such data elements, how to maintain the data, how to built measurements plan, and most importantly how to use this data to improve their processes and productivity. In fact most of the time, the available data gets destroyed and hence never used. The current talk will discuss the need and importance of software metrics, the role of metrics in different phases of SDLC, and particularly the requirement phase. The requirement elicitation is considered as the most important aspect of software development, and if not handled properly, may cause severe productivity and quality issues. The talk will elaborate different metrics that may be used in requirement elicitation process and hence may help improve the requirement document resulting in improved productivity in the overall software development.

in software engineering, the process of requirements elicitation and specification is considered as a base for all other development process. This means that any fault or mistake in the requirements definition will negatively affect the whole process of software development and consequently affect the cost, time, and effort of the developers and users. Traditionally, the process of requirement elicitation and categorization was done manually and based on the experience of the developers. However, a lot of problem came up because of the absence of automatic approaches. This paper presents a novel approach to improve the process of software requirements classification and mapping. An Information Retrieval (IR) method, namely Latent Drichelt Allocation (LDA) will be used for classification process. A corpus of software requirements also will be built to be used as input space for LDA algorithm. Typically, each requirement will have a corresponding document in the corpus. We conducted two distinct experiments. The first one is to extract the topics of software requirements, and the second one is for mapping and linking any new requirement to the most existing relevant requirements. The results showed that the proposed approach overwhelmed the state-of-art approaches.

BackgroundIn patient care, data are historically generated and stored in heterogeneous databases that are domain specific and often noninteroperable or isolated. As the amount of health data increases, the number of isolated data silos is also expected to grow, limiting the accessibility of the collected data. Medical informatics is developing ways to move from siloed data to a more harmonized arrangement in information architectures. This paradigm shift will allow future research to integrate medical data at various levels and from various sources. Currently, comprehensive requirements engineering is working on data integration projects in both patient care– and research-oriented contexts, and it is significantly contributing to the success of such projects. In addition to various stakeholder-based methods, document-based requirement elicitation is a valid method for improving the scope and quality of requirements.ObjectiveOur main objective was to provide a general catalog of functional requirements for integrating medical data into knowledge management environments. We aimed to identify where integration projects intersect to derive consistent and representative functional requirements from the literature. On the basis of these findings, we identified which functional requirements for data integration exist in the literature and thus provide a general catalog of requirements.MethodsThis work began by conducting a literature-based requirement elicitation based on a broad requirement engineering approach. Thus, in the first step, we performed a web-based systematic literature review to identify published articles that dealt with the requirements for medical data integration. We identified and analyzed the available literature by applying the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) guidelines. In the second step, we screened the results for functional requirements using the requirements engineering method of document analysis and derived the requirements into a uniform requirement syntax. Finally, we classified the elicited requirements into a category scheme that represents the data life cycle.ResultsOur 2-step requirements elicitation approach yielded 821 articles, of which 61 (7.4%) were included in the requirement elicitation process. There, we identified 220 requirements, which were covered by 314 references. We assigned the requirements to different data life cycle categories as follows: 25% (55/220) to data acquisition, 35.9% (79/220) to data processing, 12.7% (28/220) to data storage, 9.1% (20/220) to data analysis, 6.4% (14/220) to metadata management, 2.3% (5/220) to data lineage, 3.2% (7/220) to data traceability, and 5.5% (12/220) to data security.ConclusionsThe aim of this study was to present a cross-section of functional data integration–related requirements defined in the literature by other researchers. The aim was achieved with 220 distinct requirements from 61 publications. We concluded that scientific publications are, in principle, a reliable source of information for functional requirements with respect to medical data integration. Finally, we provide a broad catalog to support other scientists in the requirement elicitation phase.

Global software development (GSD) outsourcing is a modern business strategy for producing high quality software at low cost. Most of the problems in Global software development (GSD) occur due to the lack of communication between stakeholders, time zone issues, cultural differences, etc. In this paper, our main emphasis will be to improve the Value-based requirement elicitation (VBRE) steps in GSD environment and also to overcome the major GSD environment problems while taking the process of requirement elicitation from valued stakeholders. Though this model works for every kind of project but specifically for generic software.

Different software development approaches (SDAs) are developed with broad portfolios of development processes. Each of the approaches has certain exclusive principles, practices, thinking, and values, which are informally represented, implemented, and improperly institutionalized. Ontologies are developed for the representation, assessment, and adaptation of SDAs separately without having a shared terminology which may lead to terminological conflict and confusion affecting the simultaneous representation and implementation in software development industry and academia. The software engineering approaches does not consider and support sustainability as priority concern. However, the approaches have capabilities of supporting sustainable software development in different sustainability aspects. This research article aims for the designing and development of an integrated ontology of software engineering approaches (i.e., agile, lean, and green) named OntoSuSD (ontology for sustainable software development) to support sustainable software development knowledge, awareness, and implementation. The goal of OntoSuSD is to propose, design and develop a formal, generic, consistent, and shared knowledge base containing semantic terminology and description of concepts and relationships generated around the representation and implementation of lean, agile, and green approaches in software development processes, which will facilitate their simultaneous implementation and assessment for sustainable software development. The OntoSuSD is developed using practical ontology engineering methodology by reusing relevant ontologies and explicit concepts and properties are defined to fulfill knowledge requirements and representations of the domain. The OntoSuSD is evaluated, and results infer OntoSuSD has high ontological design, good domain coverage, potential applications and achieves purpose of the ontology development.

Requirements elicitation and analysis is the most crucial process in requirements engineering since it moulds the shape of the desired end product. In dealing with a system's stakeholders in a process to elicit the requirements, conflicts are inevitable. In the initial state, usually, all the stakeholders have a common goal; to build a system. However as an individual, they do have their own perspectives and perceptions. In addition, the stakeholders, either as a representative of end users, a decision maker or a developer, have different concerns, priorities and responsibilities. This paper considers introducing negotiation spiral model with supporting elements in the requirements elicitation and analysis process. Many researches show that negotiation is necessary to handle conflicts in order to gain better requirements. It is believed that the quality of intermediate deliverables like the requirements document is correlated with the quality of the final product. The advantages of implementing negotiation process are well aligned requirements by all the stakeholders, improved system quality, a sound basis for resource estimation and less resource wastage.

Improper and incorrect safety requirements specification can lead to severe accidents. The proper application of safety risk assessment techniques (SRATs) helps the safety and requirements engineers identify and assess the hazards and risks that may occur in the safety-related software systems. Thus, by integrating appropriate SRATs into the requirements elicitation activity, a more complete and correct set of software safety requirements can be elicited. This research proposes a framework and develops a web-based system that facilitates the integration of safety activities and techniques into requirements elicitation process. The web-based system is evaluated by a group of software engineers and postgraduate students. The evaluation results show that the web-based system provides a more comprehensible and effective way to integrate safety risk assessment techniques and activities into requirements elicitation, compared to the ad hoc integration performed by the development teams.