Understanding Customer Expectations for System Development

Meaning of expectations and differences among needs, expectations and requirements are ambiguous in literatures and practice. In this paper, we contribute to give a possible clarification of this ambiguity. The relationships among needs, expectations and requirements are examined together with characterization of customer expectations. We also introduce the expectations elicitation process based on engineering approach, which provides an explicit and controllable elicitation with a corresponding expectations elicitation quality model. Our goal is finally to connect expectations with value dimensions to enable value based requirements engineering.