Requirements Modelling and Specification for Service Oriented Architecture

3.6. Soft Techniques for Requirements Elicitation

Requirements engineering is about discovering knowledge, some of which is latent; people don't know what they know. The principal things that the requirements engineer must discover are business objectives (as discussed in Section 3.5), business processes, business tasks, business rules, business services and the ontology of the business: the things and concepts that the processes manipulate and the rules and services can talk about. This section discusses an assortment of techniques that I have found useful for such knowledge discovery. We start with some insights from interview theory and knowledge engineering which may also be useful in a workshop context, with a facilitator leading discussion.

3.6.1. Using Interviewing Techniques

Many techniques that can be used in normal interviews can be readily extended for use in workshops once they are well understood. This subsection discusses just a few of the techniques that I have found particularly useful.

It is usual to divide interviews into structured and focused interviews. Typically, structured interviews are at a high level of generality and take place earlier in the discovery process. A structured interview aims to grasp an overview of the topic which is broad but shallow. It will result in elicitation of the key services, objects and concepts of the domain but not go into detail. In a workshop this corresponds to running a scoping session, where the same techniques can be ...