SOFTWARE ENGINEERING GLOBAL INTERACTION LAB

Contextual Requirements Elicitation

for an Applicant Tracking System

Project Details

  • Project Overview
    Today's systems are becoming increasingly complex, hence demanding for techniques to deal with complexity. Adaptive systems are proposed to deal with complexity. Requirements elicitation is a first step in Software Engineering and has an impact on further Software Engineering activities. In a case study we were interested in how established requirements elicitation techniques like interviews, focus groups etc. can be used for eliciting contextual requirements for adaptive systems.
  • SEGAL Members Involved
    Alessia Knauss, Daniela Damian


Project Description

Today’s systems have increased in size and deal with complex environments. Systems are integrated in a landscape of other systems and end-users that they interact with. Examples of such systems are large scale complex IT systems and IT Ecosystems. Because of the amount of information surrounding such systems, the environment is becoming increasingly complex and the integration of abilities to cope with this complexity is crucial for fulfilling end-user needs in such an environment.

In an empirical investigation on a system that is integrated in such a landscape, we were interested in how established requirements elicitation techniques like interviews and focus groups can be used to elicit requirements. To deal with complex systems we propose to use contextual requirements.

Project Process and Results

An applicant tracking system, as used for our empirical investigation, needs to serve different end-user groups with different needs and in different situations. Additionally it needs to consider the input from other sources, like the integration to a system that contains the employer database, to transfer the successful applicant into this system without additional work.

Future Work

Our empirical investigation is a first step which should lead to an understanding how established requirements elicitation techniques need to be changed to support systems dealing with such a complexity. The insights will be shared.

Alessia Knauss. On the Usage of Context for Requirements Elicitation: End-User Involvement in IT-Ecosystems. Proceedings of 20th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ’12), pages 345-348, Chicago, USA, 2012. Doctoral Symposium.

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