Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
technical detail that may confuse rather than clarify…'' and, similarly, ''the cus-
tomers/users … have a poor understanding of the capabilities and limitations of
their computing environment,…'' (Pressman
2005
) can set up a team for difficulty
down the road. Environmental factors include:
• Hardware and software constraints imposed on a target system (the target sys-
tem will typically be a component of some larger system with an existing or
required architecture already in place)
• The maturity of the target system's domain
• The certainty of the target system's interfaces to the larger system
• The target system's role within a larger system
However, the initial requirements are typically underspecified, unnecessary,
and incomplete; or at times they are over-specified but burdened with needless
design constraints. Thus, elicitation activities which are either too narrow or too
broad in scope may result in requirements which are ambiguous, incomplete, not
verifiable, unnecessary, and unusable. The requirements may be unusable because
they do not reflect true user needs, or else because they are not implementable
under given environmental or project constraints.
5.4.2 Problems of Understanding
Problems of understanding during elicitation can lead to requirements which are
ambiguous, incomplete, inconsistent, and even incorrect because they do not
address the requirement elicitation stakeholders' true needs.
Problems of understanding can be separated into three issues:
1. The communities involved in the elicitation process, possess a variety of
backgrounds and experience levels, creating a situation where common
knowledge to one group may be completely foreign to another. This makes it
difficult for a requirements analyst to interpret and integrate information
gathered from these diverse communities.
2. The language used to express the requirements back to these stakeholder
communities may be too formal or too informal to meet the needs of each of the
groups, again because of the diversity of the communities.
3. The large amount of information gathered during elicitation necessitates that it
be structured in some way. The understanding of this structure is dependent on
the characteristics of the stakeholder communities.
The stakeholders involved in requirements elicitation come from at least five
communities: customers/sponsors, users, developers, quality assurance teams, and
requirements analysts. The requirements should be expressed in a form which:
