¡¡	Chinese Journal of Computers   Full Text
Title	A Problem-Driven Scenario-Based Collaborative Requirements Elicitation Method
Authors	ZHANG Wei LIU Feng ZHAO Hai-Yan MEI Hong
Address	(Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technology of Ministry of Education, Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871)
Year	2008
Issue	No.9(1554¡ª1562)
Abstract &   Background	Abstract One problem in software development is that most stakeholders can not clearly think out their needs or requirements for the envisioned software system. This paper proposes a problem-driven scenario-based collaborative requirements elicitation method, trying to provide a practical solution to the requirements elicitation problem in the context of enterprise information systems. The basic idea of this method is that software requirements should not be proposed by stakeholders subjectively, but be elicited following a problem-finding-and-solving process. That is, finding problems in the current business states, proposing solutions to resolving these problems, and then eliciting requirements from these solutions. Based on this idea, this method employs the concept of scenarios as the basic unit to describe enterprises¡® business states, and to help stakeholders declare their requirements in a collaborative way. Keywords requirements elicitation; scenarios; collaborative; software requirements Background This work is supported by National High Technology Research and Development Program of China under grant Noª±2007AA010301 and Noª±2006AA01Z156, and National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant Noª±60528006 and Noª±60703065. Domain engineering and application engineering are two important activities in software reuse. However, in current software reuse approaches, there still lacks sufficient support to achieve the continual evolution between domain engineering and application engineering. The work in this paper is an important part to achieve the continual evolution between the two activities. This work's functions are to provide an web-based requirements elicitation environment and to achieve the effective requirements elicitation and requirements modeling. After enough software requirements in a specific domain are elicited and modeled, the domain engineer then can start the domain analysis activity, that is, identifying reusable requirements from these existing requirements for specific applications. After domain reusable requirements are identified, the requirements engineer can carry out the requirements elicitation activity in a more efficient way, based on the reuse of these reusable requirements. In a narrow sense, the work in this paper belongs to the requirements elicitation activity in requirements engineering. Currently, the authors also have developed a tool prototype to support the method proposed by this paper. In the future research, the authors will investigate the feasibility of this method and the tool by applying them to real applications, and improve them based on the feedback from these feasibility studies.