The State of Practices in Requirement Elicitation: An Improved Methodology for Pak Software Industry

The discipline of Requirement Engineering is associated with great number of problems, starting from the elicitation phase to the implementation of these requirements in the software industry. Although many approaches have been proposed by the researchers, but very small number of approaches are used in software industries. It is known that requirements which are not well understood and unrestricted, changes to the scope of requirements leads numerous software projects to failure. So, good requirements are very important for project success. Paper is to explore about state of approaches regarding requirement gathering by closely exploring current approaches used by the practitioners or professionals. Aim of this paper is to focus on approaches used in software industry for elicitation purpose and the challenges faced during the process of elicitation. For this we carried out survey, based upon interviewing 20 professionals from 10 different Pakistani Information Technology companies. We analyzed these findings by qualitative methods. This includes semi structure interviews for data gathering. Various results came out from these findings. Group interaction approaches together with (brainstorming and meetings) are considered as most favorable approaches for elicitation purpose, except in small projects. Lastly, we recognized some challenges related to stakeholders. Challenges comprise of complication in prioritizing and capturing the needs of the customers. These findings need to be demonstrated in context of this research. We concluded that findings of the survey professional's knowledge should be to the interest of software industry; knowledge should be examined in professional context.