Performing Requirements Elicitation Activities Supported by Quality Ontologies

The requirements elicitation phase is often regarded as the most critical stage of the entire software engineering effort with strong evidence suggesting that increasing the effectiveness of requirements analysts and reducing requirements elicitation errors may be the key to improve project outcomes and deliver high quality software. This paper presents a requirements elicitation approach and associated tool aimed at empowering requirements analysts with a knowledge repository that helps in the process of capturing precise non-functional requirements specifications during elicitation interviews. The approach is based on the application of functional and nonfunctional domain ontologies (quality ontologies) to underpin the elicitation activities. We also discuss how the approach and tool are being used to effectively support the requirements elicitation stage of the new student intranet project of the University of Manchester (Manchester Unity Web Project).