A Study of Elicitation Techniques in Market-Driven Requirements Engineering

Abstract: Context. Compare with bespoke RE, market-driven requirements engineering (MDRE), has manyclassical requirements engineering activities of bespoke RE. Elicitation is one of these activities. Thisprocess is to capture, extract and obtain needs from stakeholders. And there are many techniques toguide MDRE elicitation, and some techniques for bespoke RE are also used in MDRE contextnowadays. However, not all of these techniques are suitable for MDRE due to the difference betweenMDRE and bespoke RE, for example, in MDRE context, there is no specific customers’ participation.Meanwhile, there is a lack of studies that compare elicitation techniques by evaluating theircompetence of mitigating MDRE challenges. Objectives. In this study, we investigate and collect techniques which can be used for MDREelicitation. We also identify challenges of MDRE elicitation practice from literature as evaluatingcriteria. Then, we evaluate elicitation techniques’ competence of mitigating these challenges. Finally,we discuss with some interviewees to validate our result with real-world MDRE context. Methods. We use literature review and snowball sampling to investigate and collect MDRE elicitationtechniques and challenges. Next, we summarize elicitation techniques’ advantages and limitationsfrom literature and compare these techniques by evaluating whether they can mitigate MDREchallenges we find. Next, we conduct interview with 8 interviewees who are practitioners or havedeveloping experience in order to find out and discuss the difference between academic and realworldMDRE. Results. We identify 6 elicitation techniques which can be used in MDRE to compare. We also collect6 challenges which may happen in MDRE elicitation process. We compare them by literature studyand interview with practitioners and find that although some interviewees’ opinions are similar withliterature, there are still many different cases we need to consider before choosing elicitationtechniques. Conclusions. In this research, we fill the gap that there is a lack of studies about the comparison ofelicitation techniques in MDRE context. We also find 4 factors which should be studied in-depth inthe future MDRE elicitation techniques research, and validate our result with practice and discuss thereason of differences. Our result can help requirements engineers to choose suitable elicitationtechniques in MDRE projects.