Impact of Elicitation Techniques on Requirement Validation in Software Industry in Pakistan

Abstract- In Requirement Engineering (RE), requirements are collected and formalized from all the stakeholders using various elicitation techniques. Afterwards, these requirements are validated at the validation phase before the actual design and development phases can initiate. At the validation stage of RE, requirement specifications are tailored to ensure that the requirements are correct, consistent, complete, and unambiguous. To achieve these objectives, the RE team should select the most suitable elicitation technique during the RE elicitation process. In Pakistan software industry, these techniques include interviews, prototyping, questionnaires, and observations. From literature, it is observed that most of the IT firms do not hire specialized RE teams for requirement gathering; instead, the requirements are collected mostly by the development team. Therefore, the primary motivation of this article is to provide a guideline for IT firms and software industry in Pakistan to select the right type of elicitation techniques for requirement gathering. This article presents the results of a comprehensive survey to evaluate the impact of elicitation techniques on requirement validation process in Pakistan software industry. We distributed a questionnaire to several IT firms across the country, and collected important data corresponding to their procedures of requirement gathering. We focused on the individuals responsible for RE processes, and our main conclusion is that requirements are mostly gathered by developers rather than specialized RE teams. Our results also show that prototyping is the most effective elicitation technique for mobile development, whereas interviews are preferred in case of Web & Desktop applications.
Keywords- Requirement Engineering (RE), SDLC, Elicitation Techniques, Requirement Validation, IT Industry in Pakistan