Performance requirement elicitation for financial information system based on ontology

A large portion of software project failures are caused by incomplete and incorrect requirements. Thus, requirement elicitation is a very critical step in the software development lifecycle. Information gathered from customers needs to be interpreted, analyzed and validated. Customers could hardly articulate their requirement accurately which may cause the misunderstanding. Furthermore, inconsistency may exist between requirements proposed by different customers. In this paper, we propose a model to elicit performance requirement from customers for financial information system (FIS) based on ontology. This model divides the performance requirements into three levels: system level, subsystem level and component level. Each level has respective performance metrics and aims at different roles of stakeholders. Between levels, ontology´s inference function is used to validate and complete the requirements. This model is illustrated in a study of performance requirement acquiring for a fund information preparation system.