Software Requirements Essentials: Core Practices for Successful Business Analysis

Chapter 3

Requirements Elicitation

The first step in dealing with requirements is to get some. People often speak of “gathering requirements,” as though it were a simple collection process: The requirements are sitting around in people’s heads, and the business analyst merely asks for them and writes them down. It’s never that simple. In reality, stakeholders begin with random fragments of information: dissatisfaction with their current systems, bits of functionality they want, tasks to perform, important pieces of data, and ideas of what screen displays might look like.

Requirements elicitation is a better term for this foundational activity. To elicit something means to draw it forth or bring it out, particularly something that’s hidden or ...