Viewpoints for requirements elicitation: a practical approach

The paper introduces an approach to multi perspective requirements engineering (PREview) which has been designed for industrial use and discusses our practical experience in applying PREview. We have developed a flexible model of viewpoints and using examples from an industrial application, show how this can be used to organise system requirements derived from radically different sources. We show how 'concerns', which are key business drivers of the requirements elicitation process, may be used to elicit and validate system requirements. They are decomposed into questions which must be answered by system stakeholders. We briefly describe the process of using PREview which has been designed to allow incremental requirements elicitation. Finally, we discuss some practical considerations which emerged when the approach was applied in industry.