Empirical Evaluation of Requirements Elicitation Techniques

The success of any software development cycle for producing the software product is based on the software requirements. The elicitation of requirements is the first and most important activity in the Requirement Engineering (RE). The problems in requirement elicitation process will result in poor requirements which can lead to the development of unsatisfactory software system. Moreover, the development of such unsatisfactory software system may be unacceptable to the user. The poor requirements have high maintenance costs, or undergo frequent changes. By improving requirement elicitation, the system development process can be improved, resulting in production of a much better system. Requirement engineering is a process including various activities namely requirement elicitation, analysis, specification and review/validation. This paper provides a comparative study of different requirement elicitation techniques. An empirical study in the form of questionnaires was conducted to evaluate the best requirements elicitation technique among Joint Application Design (JAD), Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Soft System Methodology (SSM) and Prototyping. After empirical analysis it can be concluded that none of the elicitation technique was judged best in comparison to other. On the basis of the finding of the study it is suggested that software developers, depending upon different parameters may select different software requirements elicitation technique. Keywords— Requirement, JAD, QFD, SSM, Prototyping.