Collaborative Requirements Elicitation: A Process-Centred Approach

Requirements Elicitation is one of the first and most critical processes in system engineering. In this paper we will focus on the collaborative aspects of requirement elicitation, in the context of system development. To do so, we adopted the separation of concerns method. Using this method we separate engineering aspects from collaboration aspects in order to study both aspects and finally integrate them. For the collaborative aspect of requirements elicitation we looked at Collaboration Engineering. Collaboration Engineering is an approach to design and deploy processes for recurring collaborative tasks that can be transferred to practitioners to execute for themselves without intervention of professional facilitators. From an engineering perspective we will use the requirements engineering processes described by system engineering standard EIA-632 as a starting point. To integrate these we will use methods and techniques from Collaboration Engineering to specify the collaborative processes involved in this requirements elicitation approach. An object model was build using Unified Modelling Language. This model shows different concepts underlying our approach. Finally two case studies are presented to evaluate this approach.