Eliciting requirements by analysing threats caused by users

Abstract

Eliciting requirements is an important issue of system development projects. Some approaches propose to identify requirements by analysing system malfunctioning. Different sources of malfunctioning are dealt with by these approaches: obstacles, conflicts, risks, etc. Our proposal is to analyse each of these sources of malfunctioning using a single notion that we call "threat". We propose to use this notion in a method that guides the identification and analysing of each of these sources of malfunctioning. The method helps eliciting requirements to prevent the threat. A threat is defined by a number of variables. This paper presents a literature review of all threats that relate to users. The review is based on a framework that includes several perspectives to analyse user error. The user threats is part of a global threats classification that also covers hardware, environment, design and project types of threats.