2. REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION
✘ Is considered the first, foremost and crucial stage of a requirements
engineering process.
✘ It includes activities that intend to uncover, acquire and elaborate
requirements for software systems.
✘ Requirements can be elicited from different sources
○ Stakeholders
○ Documentation
○ Existing systems
✘ Different techniques have been proposed to elicit requirements
4. FOCUS GROUPS
✘ Often consists of stakeholders from different backgrounds and with
different skills discuss in free form about the features of the system
to be developed.
✘ Focus groups helps to identify user’s expectations from the system.
✘ They often bring out spontaneous reactions and ideas.
✘ Focus groups are also a good way for time-pressed analysts to get
a lot of information at once.
✘ They may be conducted in person or virtually.
5. PROCESS
✘ Preparation
○ Recruit participants
○ Assign moderator and recorder
○ Create discussion guide
○ Reserve location
✘ Run the focus group session
○ Moderator follows a plan/script. However, discussion must appear
unstructured and free-flowing. Typically 1-2 hours in length.
✘ Reporting & Analysis
○ The participants' agreements and disagreements are objectively
analyzed and documented.
6. PROS AND CONS
PROS
✘ Rich understanding of diverse
stakeholder perceptions,
experiences and beliefs
✘ Saves time - as compared to
individual interviews.
✘ Ability to build on ideas
✘ Useful with younger/illiterate
participants.
✘ Important insights into little-
understood domain
CONS
✘ Getting hold of stakeholders for
the same date/time.
✘ Dominant personalities
✘ Relatively expensive
✘ Misrepresentation &
Generalization
✘ Possible chaotic data - difficult to
analyze
✘ Requires trained moderator
7. WHEN TO USE?
Focus groups are used when qualitative data is needed. They are used
to reflect real-world bias and elicit diverse requirements.
9. STORYBOARDING
✘ Storyboards are a series of illustrations or images displayed in
sequence to pre-visualize a system.
✘ Storyboarding uses image, text, audio, video, animation diagram to
visualize the concept of the system to the stakeholders.
✘ It allows stakeholders to come into common understanding of
about the functionality of the system being developed.
✘ Storyboards are used to gain an early reaction from users.
✘ The purpose is to elicit “Yes, but” reactions from users
✘ Communicates more clearly to users than use cases alone can.
11. PROCESS
✘ Determine the goals and audience
✘ Determine the starting point - the features, activities, or domain of
the story
✘ For each activity, identify
○ Who the players are
○ What happens to them
○ How it happens
✘ Narrative is broken down into - Trigger, Action, Reward
✘ Determine style and medium
✘ Storyboard is presented to stakeholders and modifications are
made as they go along.
12. PROS AND CONS
PROS
✘ Inexpensive
✘ User friendly, informal, interactive
✘ Easy to create and modify
✘ Early review of user interface
✘ Easy to share with large groups
✘ They don’t ‘crash’
✘ They don’t give the impression
that the system has been
developed
CONS
✘ High volatility
✘ They become outdated easily
13. WHEN TO USE?
✘ When working on the Human-to-Machine interface.
✘ When you require knowledge of data flow for tasks.
✘ Storyboards are really useful with new systems.
✘ Also when users are having trouble articulating their requirements
14. CONCLUSION
✘ There is no requirements elicitation technique that is exclusively
ideal to elicit needs in all circumstances.
✘ The selection of requirements elicitation techniques is dependent
on the problem, solution and existing requirements.
✘ It also depends on factors such as time, cost, resources and
critically of the system.
✘ Most problems encountered are a result of poor implementation.
✘ It is therefore necessary to choose the techniques best-suited for a
greater chance of authentic requirements.
Moderator -promote discussion; ask open questions; facilitate interactions between group members; engage all members; keep session focused; remain neutral; be adaptable and flexible.
Moderator follows a plan
Saves time - as opposed to individual interview
Dominant persons - impress their ideas, follow the crowd, least common denominator
Expenses - skilled moderators, participant participation, cost of environments
Misrep - data collected may not be consistent with how people actually behave - recorded/observed can lead to changed behaviour, aim to please
Trained moderator to avoid bias/ cues about responses that are more desirable
Not statistical data
Which features are more popular
story board tells a story
What the system will do
Stories are more specific and detailed
They give users real content that is easy to digest
Eliciting requirements by having target users describe in detail situations analogous to those shown in the storyboard
For each activity, the following elements are identified - Who the players are, What happens to them, How it happens
Style -drawings, textual story, videos, presentation slides, tools
Storyboard - alternatives,
Volatility - each user has different ideas
Outdated - user interface defined often change over time, hard to re-use requirements
Human-computer interaction
System is graphical and user-oriented