Assist users to straightaway suggest and describe experienced problems

Abstract

Requirements elicitation plays a vital role in building effective software. Incorrect or incomplete requirements lead to erroneous software and costs a huge amount of rework. Rework costs in terms of money and efforts are usually higher than the early detection of potential flaws in the requirements. This happens because most of the techniques employed to extract requirements fail to understand end user goals. Understanding your users and their goals is important to build a capable, viable and desirable product or software system. This paper attempts to suggest and evaluate an alternative approach to understand your potential users and their goals so that correct and complete requirements can be formulated resulting in a successful software. We introduce the concept of a tool-guided elicitation process, classify elicitation techniques in term of their suitability in such a tool-guided process, and present an initial study of the usability und usefulness of our prototype called Vision Backlog.