50 PART | II ITS users
to usability and are preferred in collaborative work places (Zowghi & Coulin,
2005 ). They are usually combined with interviews or questionnaires, which pro-
vide fine-grained feedback on more specific questions that may arise.
The benefits of this method are:
• They can uncover culturally driven differences in collaborative workplaces
that may affect requirement analysis and negotiation.
• They require fewer resources.
• They are useful in requirements’ verification and may reveal critical issues
that other techniques may lose.
On the contrary, there are several limitations that include:
• Requires expertise to conduct it.
• Focuses only on end-users.
• It is time consuming.
• It is often affected by the population diversity and fails to produce desirable
results.
- Discourse analysis
Discourse analysis is an extension of ethnography techniques, which com-
prises speech act and conversation analysis. It provides tools for the systematic
analysis of the interactional talk, which is a fundamental part of the require-
ments’ elicitation process. Using various sociolinguistic methods and linguistic
features to analyze discourse units and their interconnections, it allows extrac-
tion of meaning from speech, while considering the underlying social context
(Alvarez, 2002).
- Use cases/scenarios
With use cases it is possible to describe the sequence of users’ interactions
with the system and identify their needs, which are mapped to the functional
system requirements. The cases include fine-grained scenarios of user sessions
and begin with the system status description before and after the session. They
capture the user’s viewpoint of requirements and are useful for creating test
cases that validate them. Scenarios can be defined using natural language, but it
is important to understand first the various system processes and the role of the
user in them (Zowghi & Coulin, 2005).
The advantages of use cases/scenarios techniques are that:
• They do not require technical knowledge from users.
• The can help analysts to work proactively and define the target product by
example.
Among their limitations is that they:
• Do not cover all the processes.