4. Requirements Elicitation

A Requirement is a feature that the system must have or a constraint that it must satisfy to be acceptable to the client. The Requirements Process is aimed at defining the requirements of the system under construction. The Requirements Process can be viewed as two main activities, Requirements Elicitation, which results in the specification of the system that the customer understands, and Requirements Analysis, which results into an analysis model that the developers can unambiguously interpret. Requirements elicitation is the most challenging of the two given that it requires the collaboration of several groups of participants who have different backgrounds. On the one hand, the client and the users have a solid background in their domain and have a general idea of what the system should do. However, they may have little experience in software development or interface design. On the other hand, the developers have experience in building systems but may have little knowledge of the everyday environment of the users. Moreover, each group may be using incompatible terminologies.