Essentials of Software Engineering, 5th Edition

6.2 Requirements Elicitation and Gathering

Many software engineers start their careers in coding, designing, or testing a software system. Only a few of them become requirements analysts after they have acquired some business and industry domain knowledge. The majority of requirements analysts come from the business side with good industry domain knowledge and good communication skills. Some experienced user/customer support personnel have also progressed to attain the position of requirements analyst. Both communication skills and industry domain knowledge are important in eliciting user requirements. Communication skills are needed because users/customers do not always know how to state their needs (Tsui 2004). The requirements analyst must ...