Requirements Elicitation

In requirements engineering, 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.

The term elicitation is used in books and research to raise the fact that good requirements can not just be collected from the customer, as would be indicated by the name requirements gathering. Requirements elicitation is non-trivial because you can never be sure you get all requirements from the user and customer by just asking them what the system should do. Requirements elicitation practices include interviews, questionnaires, user observation, workshops, brain storming, use cases, role playing and prototyping.

Before requirements can be analyzed, modeled, or specified they must be gathered through an elicitation process. Requirements elicitation is a part of the requirements engineering process, usually followed by analysis and specification of the requirements.

Commonly used elicitation processes are the stakeholder meetings or interviews. For example, an important first meeting could be between software engineers and customers where they discuss their perspective of the requirements.