Extraction of viewpoints for eliciting customer's requirements based on analysis of specification change records

Abstract

Eliciting customer's requirements is the most important issue for a system integration project. Failure to elicit the customer's requirements can cause an enormous correction cost. However there are only a few practical, concrete guidelines to do. In this paper, we describe a method to extract viewpoints and checklists for eliciting customer's requirements more effectively based on analyzing specification change records. The flow of the method is 1) representing the records in an easy-readable format, 2) identifying the causes and the phases, 3) categorizing them, 4) putting a name to a category, namely a viewpoint and 5) deriving check-items for each viewpoint. We applied the method to 135 records from 4 system development cases, and we derived 39 check-items in total. We found 78% of the specification change cases could have been prevented by only 10 check-items of requirements elicitation process. This result shows that the proposed method works effectively to extract the viewpoints for eliciting customer's requirements.