User-Driven Requirements Elicitation Method with the Support of Personalized Domain Knowledge

The requirements elicitation of application software is tightly involved with the application domain and faced with many non-technological issues. It is more and more difficult for requirements engineers to explore and understand the problem space and to get what users really need and expect solely by traditional methods and techniques, especially for those application systems that involve rich domain-specific knowledge and have multiple users playing multiple roles with complex organizational structure. Users' involvement is emphasized, while users always have difficulties in delivering their requirements clearly and completely due to their vague and partial understanding of the system. Although the reuse of domain knowledge is helpful, its effectiveness is limited by the ignorance of each user's individuality and specific local concern of the system as well as the vastness of domain knowledge. Besides, users' cooperation has not been considered enough. A novel user-driven requirements elicitation method is proposed. Based on users' individualities and context, support for users to present requirements is provided, including the recommendation of domain assets and advice about multi-user cooperation. The application of the method shows the method is feasible and provides positive effects on requirements elicitation through promoting users' participation and improving domain knowledge reuse.