Requirements Elicitation - What's Missing?

The management of teams in a distributed IS development project is challenging. It has even been suggested that a new breed of managers for the management of dispersed teams is needed, especially when relationships cross national boundaries. Challenges in distributed, global IS development are understood as related to three dimensions of distance: geographic, temporal, and cultural distance, which affect the manager's ability to control and coordinate distributed IS development projects. This chapter argues that combining a relationship perspective with a success perspective is fruitful for understanding distributed IS development projects. In this context there are several significant conditions that draw the attention to the challenges in the practice of distributed IS development projects. The chapter ends with the provision of a conceptual framework addressing relational-oriented conditions for the management of distributed IS development projects. Using the framework, managers can identify the relational-oriented conditions for realizing the benefits of distributed IS development projects.

In large IS development projects a huge number of unstructured text documents become available and need to be analyzed and transformed into structured requirements. This elicitation process is known to be time-consuming and error-prone when performed manually by a requirements engineer. Thus, previous works have proposed to automate the process through alternative algorithms using different forms of knowledge. While the effectiveness of different algorithms has been intensively researched, limited efforts have been paid to investigate how the algorithms’ outcomes are determined by the utilized knowledge. Our work explores how the amount and type of knowledge affects requirements elicitation quality in two consecutive simulations. The study is based on a requirements elicitation system that has been developed as part of our previous work. We intend to contribute to the body of knowledge by outlining how the provided amount and type of knowledge determine the outcomes of automatic requirements elicitation.

Despite the increasing attention to global IS work, there is limited understanding of why and how global IS development projects succeed or fail. Based on the literature on IS success and global teams, we develop a conceptual framework for global IS development project success. We also conducted interviews with nine global IS project managers to validate this framework through a qualitative attribution analysis to identify common themes and patterns of the interview results. Global project managers identified time separation, cultural differences and geographic distance as the most significant barriers to project success. Organizations implemented various communication mechanisms, task programming, and project control methods to mitigate global risks, leading to project success.

Information modeling methods are key to the success of IS development projects. The problem in the software engineering field is not the lack of modeling methods but the proliferation of modeling methods with little theoretical foundation and empirical evidence to support their usefulness. Evaluation techniques are therefore necessary to compare and contrast these modeling methods. In this chapter, we suggest an evaluation approach based on the human information processing paradigm and the theory of equivalence of representations. This evaluation approach proposes that modeling methods can be evaluated and compared using two criteria: informational and computational equivalence.

The study identified several factors as contributing to the abandonment of IS development projects. Organizational-related issues which ranged from senior management involvement to end-user participation in the project development process were the most widespread and dominant of the factors. Organizational issues were also found to influence factors dealing primarily with economic and technological matters in project development.

This study investigates the job satisfaction of information technology (IT) professionals in an environment where computer aided software engineering (CASE) tools are used. Although the recent downturn in the economy might have temporarily eased the IT labor shortage, issues of recruitment and retention of qualified personnel are key to the success of IS development projects. This study presents a model of the combination of CASE tool usage and job satisfaction as related to internal career orientation. Two hypotheses based on this model were tested using empirical evidence collected through a survey method. The first examines whether the career orientation of IS personnel influences their job satisfaction. The second incorporates the impact of CASE tool usage on this relationship. The results indicate that in a CASE tool environment, personnel with a predominant technical career orientation have more job satisfaction than those with a predominant managerial tation. However, there is a significant and positive synergy between the sophistication of the CASE tool used and managerial competence orientation leading to higher job satisfaction. These findings indicate that combating the IT personnel shortage through task automation may also increase worker satisfaction, thereby decreasing turnover. Careful selection of the CASE tool for use may result in this win-win situation.

In this paper, we present our plan to integrate requirements elicitation concepts and learning assessments into an Information System curriculum. Both contemporary research and practitioners have noted deficiencies in the abilities of entry-level IT consultants to effectively evaluate new information system needs in business environments. Thus, the ability to professionally and effectively elicit new IS requirements adds significant value to students seeking an IS degree.

User and developer common knowledge: Effect on the success of information system development projects

Knowledge hoarding in Requirements Elicitation (RE) phase could lead to Information Systems Development (ISD) project failure. Many researchers have discussed important factors in knowledge sharing. Nevertheless, the success rate for ISD projects is low and there are other major factors for consideration. Review was conducted to identify potential gaps in existing literature and to explore new factors that impact ISD knowledge sharing in RE. Based on systematic review of literature, two new factors are identified namely Organizational Justice and Social Interdependence. The success of ISD projects are impacted by organizational justice and social interdependence. The proposed theoretical model provides project managers a new platform to further understand ISD knowledge sharing between business users and external IT professionals in RE.

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.

The geographically distributed software development has attained a significant attraction in software development industry since last few decades due to its wide acceptance across the globe. The main essence of geographically distributed software development is to expand company working by follow-the-sun strategy, get skilled labors at cheaper rates from low economy regions of world and pool-up company resources to raise their utilization graph. The requirements elicitation process is considered as one of the most challenging tasks during software development process in traditional as well as geographically distributed software development projects due to its social and collaborative nature. This article presents a comprehensive insight about major challenges faced by requirements elicitation teams engaged in geographically distributed software development projects. The article also elaborates the possible strategies, which can be adopted to minimize the negative impact of geological distribution of software development activities. The presented study will help the requirements elicitation teams to better plane their requirements elicitation sessions for geological distributed software development projects by encountering the expected hurdles.

The effects of project uncertainty and risk management on IS development project performance: A vendor perspective

Requirements elicitation has long been recognized as a crucial activity in any software development project. Unfortunately, the traditional elicitation practices do not scale well when applied to larger projects, where knowledge is distributed across numerous geographically dispersed stakeholders. As a result, new distributed requirements elicitation tools have started to surface, such as online forums and wiki pages. In our previous work, we introduced a framework for supporting distributed elicitation by utilizing data mining and machine learning techniques to automatically group stakeholder ideas into forums, and by using recommender system technologies to help promote these forums to potentially interested stakeholders. The framework is designed to create an open and more inclusive environment where points of view, conflicts, interests and tradeoffs are identified as early as possible. In this paper, we present two substantial enhancements to the Recommender System component of this framework, and demonstrate through experiments how they improve the quality of the recommendations.

Many software development projects fail because the resulting software does not satisfy the end user’s needs. If requirement engineer have practiced more effectively requirements elicitation techniques, fewer projects will fail. There are numbers of techniques available which can be used by requirement engineers for taking requirements form their clients. Requirement engineer encounters number of difficulties while selecting one of the most suitable techniques of requirements elicitation for a particular project. A technique which is used in one project for taking requirements may not be suitable for another. Selecting a technique for taking requirements elicitation depends upon number of factors and as and when there is a change in these factors, techniques needs to be adjusted. This research work is a comparison of requirements elicitation techniques with a focus to find out most effective and most preferred requirements elicitation technique. In this research five elicitation techniques are taken for comparison. These techniques are Interview, Joint Application Design, Brainstorming, User Scenarios and Mind Mapping. These techniques are selected on the basis of their historical developments. The result of research shows that Interview is the best technique among these techniques. These results are based upon the empirical study and literature study. In empirical study a questionnaire was prepared related to these five techniques and responses are collected from requirements engineers working in various software development companies and people involved in website developments. In literature study, various research papers related to requirements engineering were studied. In literature review again interview technique was turned out to be an effective technique and new research also supports the same results.

Experiences and expectations with CASE technology — An example from Slovenia