Improving the quality and quantity of functional and non-functional requirements obtained during requirements elicitation stage for the development of e-commerce mobile applications: An alternative reference process model

Abstract

Many of the software development projects are not successfully finished. In many cases, this is because the software requirements were not correctly identified. One of the factors that affect the elicitation of requirements is the proper selection of requirements elicitation techniques. Even when there is a lot of literature that proposes several requirements elicitation techniques, there is no reference process model that indicates the techniques that must be applied by a requirement's engineer to elicit the requirements of a mobile application for e-commerce. This gap covers both the elicitation of functional and nonfunctional requirements. Therefore, the authors propose a new model called reference process model for requirements elicitation for e-commerce mobile applications development (RPM-REFEMAD), which allows the elicitation of requirements based on the use of four elicitation techniques combined in ten steps. The proposed model was applied in the requirements elicitation of two e-commerce mobile applications in different scenarios. To visualise the results of the model, a survey was designed and applied to users/stakeholders who participated in the reference process model evaluation. The survey results indicated that RPM-REFEMAD model helps to elicit more quality and quantity functional and non-functional requirements, in comparison with the use of traditional requirements elicitation techniques.