In Requirements Engineering, requirements elicitation aims the acquisition of information from the stakeholders of a system-to-be. An important task during elicitation is to identify and render explicit the stakeholders' implicit assumptions about the system-to-be and its environment. Purpose of doing so is to identify omissions in, and conflicts between requirements. This paper o?ers a conceptual framework for the identi?cation and documentation of default requirements that stakeholders may be using. The framework is relevant for practice, as it forms a check-list for types of questions to use during elicitation. An empirical validation is described, and guidelines for elicitation are drawn.
The requirements engineering (RE) process is a decision-rich complex problem solving activity. This paper examines the elements of organization-oriented macro decisions as well as process-oriented micro decisions in the RE process and illustrates how to integrate classical decision-making models with RE process models. This integration helps in formulating a common vocabulary and model to improve the manageability of the RE process, and contributes towards the learning process by validating and verifying the consistency of decision-making in RE activities. Goals capture, at different levels of abstraction, the various objectives the system under consideration should achieve. Goal-oriented requirements engineering is concerned with the use of goals for eliciting, elaborating, structuring, specifying, analyzing, negotiating, documenting, and modifying requirements. This area has received increasing attention. The paper reviews various research efforts undertaken along this line of research. The arguments in favor of goal orientation are first briefly discussed. The paper then compares the main approaches to goal modeling, goal specification and goal-based reasoning in the many activities of the requirements engineering process. To make the discussion more concrete, a real case study is used to suggest what a goal-oriented requirements engineering method may look like. Experience, with such approaches and tool support are briefly discussed as well. 