User requirements and preferences for ITS Chapter | 4 45is important to foresee maintenance activities that update the requirements
when necessary. Any change must be justified and traced in order to facili-
tate requirements management.
In the above phases of requirements elicitation, software analysts must care-
fully choose the appropriate techniques from a wide-range of available tech-
niques (Sharma & Pandey, 2013), which are described in subsequent sections.
According to Hickey & Davis (2003) the selection of a specific requirements’
elicitation technique for software analysts is based on several assumptions:
• The technique is the only known technique that analysts know.
• The technique worked effectively in the past and thus is expected to also
work now.
• The technique intuitively seems to be effective for the current problem.
• A software development methodology is followed, which explicitly states
that a particular technique must be employed.
4.3 Requirement elicitation techniques
Several techniques have been proposed in the literature for the elicitation of
requirements.
4.3.1 Traditional techniques
Traditional techniques consist of interviews, surveys, and questionnaires as well
as document analysis. These are the oldest and most commonly used techniques.
- Interviews
The interviews commonly use verbal methods that require only questions
to be asked by the stakeholders. They are frequently used for sharing ideas
with the analysts and for expressing the stakeholders’ needs. The interviewer is
required to have some knowledge of the domain, social skills, and the ability to
listen and record the requirements.
Interviews range from totally structured or semi-structured, that use closed
questions for collecting quantitative data, to completely unstructured that use
open-ended questions for understanding user expectations. Each interview type
has its pros and cons, but the usefulness of the data collected by the interview
is affected by the questions’ quality. So, it is important to study each method
carefully to choose the most appropriate to use.
- Document analysis
The document analysis technique gathers information from the analysis
of domain-related documents and can be used to form a basic set of require-
ments which are further refined by other techniques (e.g., through interviews).
When the technique is used in a system replacement or expansion project, the