An Exploratory Study of Topic Importance in Requirements Elicitation Interviews

Interviewing stakeholders is a common way to elicit information about requirements of the system-to-be and the conditions in its operating environment. One difficulty in preparing and doing interviews is how to avoid missing the information that may be important to understand the requirements and environment conditions. Some information may remain implicit throughout the interview, if the interviewed stakeholder does not consider it important, and the business analyst fails to mention it, or a topic it relates to. We propose the so-called Elicitation Topic Map (ETM), which is intended to help business analysts prepare elicitation interviews. ETM is a diagram that shows topics that can be discussed during requirements elicitation interviews, and shows how likely it is that stakeholders tend to discuss each of the topics spontaneously (as opposed to being explicitly asked questions on that topic by the business analyst). ETM was produced through a combination of theoretical and empirical research.