Identifying Design Features Using Combination of Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Abstract

Requirements elicitation (RE) is the explanatorydevelopment activity of helping users figure out what theywant. However, acquisition of requirements is challenging andinappropriate requirements might lead to unncessary projectdevelopment cost. It is important to validate the requirementswith various possible techniques to design a software solution. It is equally important to choose appropriate techniques for RE. To understand the importance of RE, Energy feedback or visualizationof electricity consumption application had been chosenwhich would help in reducing household electricity consumptionby motivating the residential end-users. To design an effectiveand innovative solution for visualization application, this articleused a combination of three RE techniques, viz., systematicliterature review (SLR), crowdsourcing survey and user-centreddesign (UCD) based design activity. The SLR assessed 22 studies, while the crowdsourcing survey and the design activity had137 and 6 participants respectively. The RE techniques wereinterdependent and the results from each technique was fedto design the subsequent phases. Each of the RE techniques'motivation, procedure and its results were discussed and werestatistically compared with each other forming the top sevenfeatures of the system to be developed. This study also analyzedthe effectiveness of the requirements elicitation by conductingretrospective on the RE techniques. The retrospective analyzedthings that went well, things that did not go well, and things thatcan be improved. It led to the discussion on how effectively canthis process be improved to collect the requirements.