Guidelines
In 1997, Sommerville and Sawyer suggested a set of guidelines for requirements elicitation, to address concerns such as those identified by Christel and Kang:
- Assess the business and technical feasibility for the proposed system
- Identify the people who will help specify requirements and understand their organizational bias
- Define the technical environment (e.g., computing architecture, operating system, telecommunications needs) into which the system or product will be placed
- Identify "domain constraints" (i.e., characteristics of the business environment specific to the application domain) that limit the functionality or performance of the system or product to be built
- Define one or more requirements elicitation methods (e.g., interviews, focus groups, team meetings)
- Solicit participation from many people so that requirements are defined from different points of view; be sure to identify the rationale for each requirement that is recorded
- Identify ambiguous requirements as candidates for prototyping
- Create usage scenarios or use cases to help customers/users better identify key requirements
Read more about this topic: Requirements Elicitation