Dante Carrizo

What do researchers mean by "the right requirements elicitation techniques"?

Researchers often claim that the most appropriate elicitation techniques should be chosen to capture software requirements, but: what does it mean for them? This work carried out a systematic mapping on comparisons among elicitation techniques for knowing the constructs utilized to represent their appropriateness. This study identified 43 works that utilized 58 ways of measuring the goodness of the techniques. These metrics were classified, mainly, by types of constructs such as quality, adequacy, effectiveness, quantity and efficiency. The results show the large dispersion occurring between researchers on how to select the most appropriate technique for each elicitation session and, therefore, more convergent proposals are required.

Contextual attributes impacting the effectiveness of requirements elicitation Techniques: Mapping theoretical and empirical research

Background: Software engineers can utilise a myriad of elicitation techniques to capture relevant information in order to specify requirements. The effectiveness of these techniques varies depending on the context in which the elicitation takes place. So, it is important to identify the attributes that represent this context. Objective: This paper aims to match theoretical to empirical research on contextual attributes that influence elicitation technique effectiveness. Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study to identify proposed attributes (by theoretical works) and attributes studied empirically. Then we map empirical results with theoretical proposals. Results: 60% of theoretically proposed attributes have been studied empirically. There seems to be some degree of coordination between theory and empiricism. However, there is empirical confirmation of the impact of only a third of the theoretically proposed attributes. Conclusions: These results call for more empirical research in order to evaluate beliefs with respect to elicitation techniques.

Identifying moderator variables through requirements elicitation experiments limitations

Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in Requirements Engineering (RE). Despite its importance, research in interviews is quite limited, in particular from an experimental perspective. We have performed a series of experiments exploring the relative effectiveness of structured and unstructured interviews. This line of research has been active in Information Systems in the past years, so that our experiments can be aggregated together with existing ones to obtain guidelines for practice. Experimental aggregation is a demanding task. It requires not only a large number of experiments, but also considering the influence of the existing moderators. However, in the current state of the practice in RE, those moderators are unknown. We believe that analyzing the threats to validity in interviewing experiments may give insight about how to improve further replications and the corresponding aggregations. It is likely that this strategy may be applied in other Software Engineering areas as well.

Prototyping Use as a Software Requirements Elicitation Technique: A Case Study

Prototyping is an agile software development methodology. It has also been proposed as a technique to obtain the software requirements from the stakeholders. However, there are few publications proposing a prescriptive guide and show its use in practice. This article presents a report of a case in which the prototype technique was used to elicit requirements of a software system in the university academic context. For this, authors propose a procedure to apply and they carry out elicitation sessions with two stakeholders who have different familiarity with the domain. The results show that the technique is effective in achieving a high coverage of the requirements and that it seems to perform better with stakeholders who have more familiarity with the domain. Although the results do not have statistical power, the case yields trends that can help development teams adopt this technique to produce the requirements in certain cases.

Ethnographic Study on Practices of the Software Development Industry in Chile

Research in software engineering generates results that are supposed to be useful to practitioners. However, there is little evidence of the degree of adoption by the development industry. This article presents an investigation about the practices of the software industry in Chile to obtain information on its processes, tools and methods, as well as factors of success, risk and failure in the development of a software product. For this, an ethnographic study was carried out by making short stays in a set of companies dedicated to the development of software. As a result, it was obtained that the companies perform their projects through a set of good practices, and identifying the client as a fundamental factor in the development of their projects. The study allowed knowing the gaps between national and international practices as a reference. This can help guide future industry methodological strategies.

Formalizing a Cost Construct Model related to the Software Requirements Elicitation Techniques

Requirements elicitation uses several techniques helping to gather needs that software systems to be developed must satisfy. The selection of these techniques, in any moment of the software development, is made based on its context-dependent effectiveness. However, the cost of using these techniques is generally not considered in this decision. This work aims to formalize a cost construct to determine the resources needed to use a specific elicitation technique. For this, authors develop a method based on the fragmentation procedure of each technique in unitary actions or operations. This method has allowed us to establish the cost of 16 techniques elicitation techniques. This cost model proposed seeks to complement the selection criteria of requirements elicitation techniques.

Assessment method of empirical studies in software engineering

Empirical studies are one of the main inputs of Evidence-based Software Engineering to generate a body of knowledge. For this reason, it is important to know the reliability of the results applying empirical methods. This article presents a method that evaluates the reliability of empirical studies related to software engineering. For this, the authors considered aspects deal with the mitigation of threats to validity from scientific literature and generate an evaluation mechanism. The method is validated by applying it to a scientific article. Although the results seem to give a degree of reliability, it is necessary replicated in other studies to perform a calibration of the method.

Framework for selecting solutions based on Geographic Information Systems

Due to the development of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), tasks that relied on extensive ranges of time and resources they have been simplified. At present, there are a variety of alternative SIG, hampering the decision making when choosing a suitable GIS for a specific project. Therefore, in this paper a framework that supports decision-making in the selection of GIS in an organization of any type and size is presented. This framework has been generated from a deep research capabilities and success stories of GIS in organizations. The framework is based on two factors: technical feasibility and economic viability. The selection method is applied to a case study in which GIS viable solutions that fit the attributes of the company are analyzed. Authors intend in the future to develop a framework-based software to facilitate the incorporation of GIS in organizations.

Clasificación de prácticas de educción de requisitos en desarrollos ágiles: un mapeo sistemático

espanolLos metodos de desarrollos agiles priorizan los requisitos para obtener entregas incrementales en funcionalidad. Por lo que la educcion de estos requisitos debe seleccionar estas funcionalidades principales y especificarlas eficientemente. No obstante, aun no existen catastros de practicas que orienten en este sentido. Este trabajo pretende identificar la mayor cantidad de practicas de educcion en desarrollos agiles de la literatura cientifica y clasificarlas segun el foco principal de cada practica. Para esto se lleva a cabo un mapeo sistematico sobre las principales bases de datos del area. Los resultados obtenidos dan cuenta de un insuficiente reporte de guias de educcion para los desarrolladores agiles. Los estudios primarios son principalmente teoricos, esto quiere decir que las practicas de educcion de requisitos en metodos agiles aun requieren mas validacion empirica para ser aceptadas. Es necesaria la definicion de ontologias, respecto a educcion en desarrollos agiles, que faciliten la identificacion de practicas utiles para la obtencion de productos exitosos. EnglishAgile development methods prioritize the requirements for incremental delivery functionality. So the elicitation of these requirements must select these main features and specify them efficiently. However, there are still no registers that drive practices in this way. This work aims to identify as many elicitation practices in agile developments of scientific literature and classify them according to the main focus of each guideline. For this, it carries out a systematic mapping over main databases in this area. The results obtained show insufficient reporting guidelines for agile developers. Primary studies are mainly theoretical, this means that the requirements for elicitation practices in agile methods still require further empirical validation to be accepted. The definition of ontology is absolutely necessary, regarding elicitation in agile developments, to facilitate the identification of useful practices for obtaining successful products.