Abstract
In requirements engineering (RE), an early yet critical activity consists in eliciting the requirements from various stakeholders, who usually have different assumptions, knowledge, and intentions. The goal during elicitation is to understand what stakeholders expect from a given software, expectations which then feed the analysis, prioritization, validation, and ultimately specification activities of the RE process. Elicitation is an interactive activity. It relies on verbal communication of statements of stakeholders about their requirements, their ideas, their assumptions, the constraints they know apply in the environment of the future software, and so forth. Statements, we claim, build either on a past experience of the stakeholder or are the result of reasoning from indirect experience, i.e., they have different grounds. In this paper, we introduce the concept of “Statement Ground” during RE, contrast it with the classical perspective on requirements elicitation, and position the concept in existing RE literature. We conduct an empirical assessment of the relative qualities of statements that have different grounds. Our work results in a better understanding of the statements produced by stakeholders during requirements elicitation, of their qualities, and of the interplay between those qualities and the concept of statement ground. It also results in the definition of a series of research questions which focus on the implications of our findings on the overall requirements engineering activity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Antoniou, G. (1998). The role of nonmonotonic representations in requirements engineering. International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 8, 385–399.
Billington, D., Estivill-Castro, V., Hexel, R., & Rock, A. (2011). Requirements engineering via non-monotonic logics and state diagrams. In Maciaszek, LeszekA. and Loucopoulos, P., ed.: Evaluation of novel approaches to software engineering. Springer Berlin Heidelberg (pp. 121–135).
Boden, M.A. (2013). Creativity In Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes, ed. The Routledge companion to aesthetics. Routledge Handbooks Online.
Brewka, G., Niemelä, I., & Truszczynski, M. (2007). Nonmonotonic reasoning. In Handbook of Knowledge Representation. Volume 3 (pp. 239–284).
Brewka, G., Roelofsen, F., & Serafini, L. (2007). Contextual default reasoning. In IJCAI International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 268–273).
Burnay, C. (2016). Are stakeholders the only source of information for requirements engineers? Toward a taxonomy of elicitation information sources.
Burnay, C., Jureta, I.J., & Faulkner, S. (2014). An exploratory study of topic importance in requirements elicitation interviews. In Proc. 26th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE’14) (pp. 180–195).
Christel, M.G., & Kang, K.C. (1992). Issues in requirements elicitation. Technical Report CMU/SEI-92-TR-12 ESC-TR-92-012.
Davis, A.M., Dieste, O., Hickey, A.M., Juristo, N., & Moreno, A.M. (2006). Effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques: empirical results derived from a systematic review. In Proc. 14th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (pp. 179–188).
Easterbrook, S., Singer, J., Storey, M.A., & Damian, D. (2008). Selecting empirical methods for software engineering research. In Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering (pp. 285–311).
Elrakaiby, Y., Ferrari, A., Spoletini, P., Gnesi, S., & Nuseibeh, B. (2017). Using argumentation to explain ambiguity in requirements elicitation interviews. In Proceedings-2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference RE 2017 (pp. 51–60).
Ferrari, A., Spoletini, P., & Gnesi, S. (2015). Ambiguity as a resource to disclose tacit knowledge. In 2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), IEE (pp. pp. 26–35).
Fritz, C.O., Morris, P.E., & Richler, J.J. (2012). Effect size estimates: current use, calculations, and interpretation. Journal of Experimental Psychology:, General, 141, 2–18.
Goguen, J.A., & Linde, C. (1993). Techniques for requirements elicitation. In Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (pp. 152–164).
Gotel, O.C.Z., & Finkelstein, A.C.W. (1994). An analysis of the requirements traceability problem. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Requirements Engineering, IEEE (pp. 94–101).
Gėnova, G., Fuentes, J.M., Llorens, J., Hurtado, O., & Moreno, V. (2013). A framework to measure and improve the quality of textual requirements. Requirements Engineering, 18, 25–41.
Greenspan, S., Mylopoulos, J., & Borgida, A. (1994). On formal requirements modeling languages: RML revisited. In Proc. 16th International Conference on Software engineering (pp. 135–147).
Hickey, A.M., & Davis, A.M. (2004). A unified model of requirements elicitation. Journal of Management Information Systems, 20, 65–84.
Ionita, D., Bullee, J. W., & Wieringa, R. J. (2014). Argumentation-based security requirements elicitation: the next round. In 2014 IEEE 1st International Workshop on Evolving Security and Privacy Requirements Engineering ESPRE 2014 - Proceedings (pp. 7–12).
Jureta, I.J., Mylopoulos, J., & Faulkner, S. (2008). Revisiting the core ontology and problem in requirements engineering. In Proc. 16th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (pp. 71–80).
Karlsson, J. (1996). Software requirements prioritizing. In Proc. 2nd IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (pp. 110–116).
Maiden, N., Gizikis, A., & Robertson, S. (2004). Provoking creativity: imagine what your requirements could be like. IEEE Software, 21, 68–75.
Maiden, N., & Rugg, G. (1996). ACRE: selecting methods for requirements acquisition. Software Engineering Journal, 11, 183–192.
McCarthy, J. (1980). Circumscription - a form of non-monotonic reasoning. Artificial intelligence, 13, 27–39.
Merriam-Webster online. (December 10, 2019). Belief. https://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/Belief?utm_campaign=sd&utm_medium=serp&utm_source=jsonld.
Moore, R. (1984). Possible-world semantics for autoepistemic logic.
Nuseibeh, B., & Easterbrook, S. (2000). Requirements engineering: a roadmap. In Proc. Workshop on the Future of Software Engineering. Volume 1. 35–46.
Pelletier, F.J., & Elio, R. (2005). The case for psychologism in default and inheritance reasoning. Synthese, 146, 7–35.
Pohl, K. (2010). Requirements engineering: fundamentals, principles, and techniques. Springer Publishing Company Incorporated.
Poole, D. (1988). A logical framework for default reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 36, 27–47.
Princeton University: About WordNet. (2010). WordNetPrinceton University. <http://wordnet.princeton.edu>.
Rahwan, I., & Simari, G. (2009). Argumentation in artificial intelligence. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Heidelberg.
Reiter, R. (1980). A logic for default reasoning. Artificial Intelligence, 13, 81–132.
Robertson, S., & Robertson, J. (2012). Mastering the requirements process: getting requirements right Addison-wesley.
Rolland, C., Grosz, G., & Kla, R. (1999). Experience with goal-scenario coupling in requirements engineering. In Proc IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering IEEE Comput. Soc (pp. 74–81).
Saeki, M., Matsumura, K., & ichi Shimoda Kaiya, H. (1996). Structuring utterance records of requirements elicitation meetings based on speech act theory. In ICRE. 21.
Searle, J.R. (1969). Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge university press.
Steup, M. (2014). Epistemology. In Edward N. Zalta, ed.: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 201 edn. (pp. 1–34).
Sutcliffe, A., & Ryan, M. (1998). Experience with SCRAM, a scenario requirements analysis method. In Proc. 3rd IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (pp. 164–171).
Sutcliffe, A., & Sawyer, P. (2013). Requirements elicitation: towards the unknown unknowns. In Proc. 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference RE IEEE (pp. 92–104).
Van Zee, M., Bex, F., & Ghanavati, S. (2015). Rationalization of goal models in GRL using formal argumentation. In 2015 IEEE 23rd International Requirements Engineering Conference RE 2015 - Proceedings (pp. 220–225).
Yu, Y., Tun, T.T., Tedeschi, A., Franqueira, V.N., & Nuseibeh, B. (2011). Openargue: supporting argumentation to evolve secure software systems. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference RE 2011 (pp. 351–352).
Zowghi, D., & Coulin, C. (2005). Requirements elicitation: a survey of techniques, approaches, and tools. In Aurum, Aybüke and Wohlin, C., ed.: Engineering and managing software requirements. Springer Berlin Heidelberg 19–46.
Zowghi, D., Ghose, A., & Peppas, P. (1996). A framework for reasoning about requirements evolution.
Zowghi, D., & Offen, R. (1997). A logical framework for modeling and reasoning about the evolution of requirements. In Proc. 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (pp. 247–257).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Burnay, C., Bouraga, S., Gillain, J. et al. What lies behind requirements? A quality assessment of statement grounds in requirements elicitation. Software Qual J 28, 1615–1643 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09521-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11219-020-09521-2