QUALITATIVE COMPARISONS OF ELICITATION TECHNIQUES INREQUIREMENT ENGINEERING

It is often emphasized that the quality of elicited requirement is mostly influenced by the elicitation techniques employed to gather software requirements. Many elicitation techniques have been presented in requirement engineering but they are hardly adopted in practice as the available empirical and comparative evaluations are inadequate to guide the software industry on which technique is better. Classifying a selection of seven requirement elicitation techniques as collaborative, individual or contextual, this study compares the popular techniques using two groups of qualitative criteria - terms of information collection and quality of feedback information. The evaluation results are tabulated and the findings are depicted by spider diagrams. The study concludes that each technique has its strengths and weaknesses, the factors software engineers should weigh when selecting appropriate techniques for requirement elicitation.