Authors : Yirsaw Ayalew and Audrey Masizana-Katongo
Abstract: Requirements elicitation is concerned with the extraction of users’ requirements, which involves cognitive, social, communication and technical issues. To support and improve the elicitation process, there are many techniques each with its own strengths and weaknesses. However, some of them are misused, others are never used and only a few are applied again and again. The reason is that requirement engineers have difficulty in deciding what elicitation techniques to use in a particular software development project due to lack of information regarding the available elicitation techniques, their usefulness and how suitable they are to the project. This study proposes a multi-criteria group decision support approach for the selection of requirements elicitation techniques by incorporating the factors that affect the selection of elicitation techniques. This approach is based on the practice of decision making process which involves a group of requirements engineers selecting a particular technique or set of techniques which are suitable for the project at hand. The multi-criteria group decision support based on AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) provides a formal model of specifying the relative importance of the selection factors and the applicability of the techniques with respect to each of the factors. AHP can prevent subjective judgment errors and increase the likelihood that the results are reliable.
Yirsaw Ayalew and Audrey Masizana-Katongo , 2008. A Multi-Criteria Group Decision Support Approach for Requirements Elicitation Techniques Selection. Asian Journal of Information Technology, 7: 40-52.