Challenges faced by Business Analysts eliciting User Requirements in the software industry: A survey-based study

Requirement gathering is considered as one of the most important activity is software development lifecycle (SDLC). If requirements are not gathered properly then there is huge expectation gap between what the customer desire and what the developer built. Currently, there are various techniques used to elicit software requirements such as interview, questionaries, and prototyping etc. However, identify the common risks arise and adopting the best methodology in requirement gathering is still a topic of debate. In this paper, we performed a survey-based study featuring 21 participants aims to identify various aspects in requirement gathering process such as best approaches, techniques, problems occurred, risks involved, and benefits. The participants involved in this study are from diverse industrial roles (i.e., business analyst, software developer and technical lead etc.) and are working in requirement gathering process of real software projects. The main findings of this survey study shows that many participants (16/21, 76.2%) use interview approach followed by prototyping approach (13/21, 61.9%) to elicit the requirements. Moreover, related to potential risks, (9/21, 42.9%) participants responds insufficient user involvement and ambiguous requirements as most common risks experienced by business analyst, whereas (1/21, 4.8%) participant select gold plating as less frequent risk arise during requirement gathering.