A Business Rules Oriented Requirements Elicitation Method for the Development of Electronic Commerce Applications

This paper describes an action research study which focussed on requirements capture for a subscription-based business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic commerce (EC) system. The study used a recently developed approach to requirements elicitation, the Business Rules Diagram (BRD) Method. The BRD method was adapted somewhat during the study and was found to be helpful in addressing difficulties of requirements elicitation in the development of the EC system because it was able to integrate both business rules and system processing rules. The paper describes the action research conducted, the BRD method that was used, and gives examples of the BRD use on the EC system.