Extraction of viewpoints for eliciting customer´s requirements based on analysis of specification change records

Eliciting customer´s requirements is the most important issue for a system integration project. Failure to elicit the customer´s requirements can cause an enormous correction cost. However there are only a few practical, concrete guidelines to do. In this paper, we describe a method to extract viewpoints and checklists for eliciting customer´s requirements more effectively based on analyzing specification change records. The flow of the method is 1) representing the records in an easy-readable format, 2) identifying the causes and the phases, 3) categorizing them, 4) putting a name to a category, namely a viewpoint and 5) deriving check-items for each viewpoint. We applied the method to 135 records from 4 system development cases, and we derived 39 check-items in total. We found 78% of the specification change cases could have been prevented by only 10 check-items of requirements elicitation process. This result shows that the proposed method works effectively to extract the viewpoints for eliciting customer´s requirements.