Daniel M. Berry

Cheriton School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, ON, Canada

Abstract:

This talk observes that determining what the requirements for a software system should be can be the hardest part of the software lifecycle, perhaps an order of magnitude more difficult than specifying them formally. This hard part has been given the name ``requirements elicitation''. It reviews past work in requirements engineering and remarks that this work generally avoided dealing with elicitation and has focused on specification. It then surveys recent and current work and shows how it focuses on cracking the elicitation problem.