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To cover the intrinsic problem of eliciting requirements,
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many different techniques have been proposed. So here
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I list some of most traditional techniques for
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requirement elicitation and as I present those, please keep
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in mind that these techniques can be used
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separately or combined. A first technique is called background
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reading. And, this technique involves collecting information by
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reading existing documents such as company reports, organizational charts,
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policy manuals, job descriptions, documentation of existing systems and so
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on. And, this technique is especially appropriate when one Is
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not familiar with your organization for which the requirements are
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being collected. So you want to get some background before interviewing
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actual people. And one of the main imitations of these
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kinds of approaches is that written documents might be out
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of sync and they often are out of sync with
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reality. Tend to be long winded. It may contain many irrelevant
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details, so you may have to look at a lot
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of materials to extract enough information. The hard data and
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samples techniques consist in deciding which hard data we want
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to collect and choosing the sample of the population for which
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to collect such data and hard data includes facts and
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figures such as forms, invoices, financial information, survey results, marketing
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data, and so on. And the sampling of this data
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can be done in different ways. For example, the typical ways
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to do random selection. Interviews are another typical approach for
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requirement solicitation, and this is the approach that we use for
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the first project in this course, for instance. Interviews can be
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structured in which case there is an agenda of fairly open
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questions or they can be open ended in which case there
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is no preset agenda and the interview is more of a
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conversation. On the positive side, interviews can collect a rich set
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of information because they allow for uncovering opinions as well as
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hard facts. Moreover, they can probe in depth through follow
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up questions. On the more negative side, interviewing requires special
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skills that are difficult to master and require experience. And
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it is not enough to collect a lot of information. If
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this information is hard to analyze or even irrelevant, it
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might become useless. So you need to know how to conduct
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an interview in order to take advantage of these techniques.
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Surveys can also be extremely useful for gathering new requirements because
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they can quickly collect information from a large number
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of people. Moreover, they can be administered remotely. For
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example, by email, through the web. On the other
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hand, surveys tend to severely constrain the information that
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the user can provide and might miss opportunities to
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collect unforeseen, relevant information. Finally, meetings are generally used
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for summarization of findings and collection of feedback, so as
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to confirm or refute what has been learned. So the
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only additional thing I want to mention about meetings
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is the fact that it is fundamental that have clearly
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stated objectives and are planned carefully. This is something that
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should be quite obvious, but doesn't always happen in practice.
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