Towards a collaborative and combinational approach to requirements elicitation within a systems engineering framework

Despite its critical importance to the process of systems development, requirements elicitation continues to be a major problem in both research and practice. This complex activity involving many different facets and issues is often performed badly and subsequently blamed for project failure and poor quality systems. In this paper, we present a collaborative and combinational approach to requirements elicitation within a systems engineering framework, proposing the application of current research from other disciplines in areas related to requirements elicitation, such as software engineering and the social sciences, to a general systems engineering context. The work provides both researchers and practitioners with an approach to requirements elicitation for systems engineering that can be applied to real world projects to improve both the process and results, thereby increasing the overall chance of successful system development in terms of on schedule and on budget delivery, and satisfied customers.