Dealing with Change in Software Development: A Challenge for Requirements Engineering

The research explored the requirements elicitation process in the development of Student Affairs Information Systems at one university. This system was developed by the internal team instead of outsourcing. An action research method was employed in order to examine how requirements should be handled; and implement the effective ways to carry out the elicitation process. The system development was divided into 9 phases starting from student activity system. During the elicitation process, four main problems were discovered: 1) users tried to avoid the interviews or reluctant to state their requirements; 2) users did not know how computers would change their work; 3) users asked for changes even after system was developed; 4) technology change was not taken into consideration. From these problems, some solving methods were applied during the elicitation process: 1) arranged study visits to obtain new ideas of software solution; 2) created prototypes to compare with users' requirements and experiences; 3) considered an issue of technology change to find possible applications of current technologies.