A Systematic Study on Software Requirements Elicitation Techniques and its Challenges in Mobile Application Development

• Published in: IEEE access Vol. 6; pp. 63859 - 63867
• Main Authors: Dar, Hafsa, Lali, M. Ikramullah, Ashraf, Humaira, Ramzan, Muhammad, Amjad, Tehmina, Shahzad, Basit
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 2018; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: android application; Application programming interfaces; Applications programs; Complex systems; Guidelines; Literature reviews; Mobile applications; Mobile communication; Mobile communications networks; Mobile computing; Quality assessment; Requirement elicitation; requirement gathering; Requirements analysis; Requirements engineering; Requirements specifications; Software; Software development; software development life cycle; Software engineering; Stakeholders
• ISSN: 2169-3536; 2169-3536
• DOI: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2874981

Software Requirements Engineering has paved its roots in both industry and academia, as today's complex systems are programmed to provide efficient user-centric functionalities. This also refers to the emergence of challenges in Requirements Elicitation techniques, approaches, and tools while performing them. Particularly, in the area of Requirements Engineering for software development, a number of techniques and approaches have been observed in literature but for mobile application development, which is different from the traditional software development, has not been discussed much in past studies. Short development cycle, device limitations, and less development time for mobile application development are some of the issues to which there is no 'silver bullet' available. Therefore, the Requirement Analysts are in dire need of defined guidelines for Requirement Elicitation in mobile application development. With this study, we aim to provide a detailed overview of Requirements Elicitation techniques and its challenges. We have conducted a systematic literature review by surveying 4507 initial and 36 primary studies. A comprehensive set of 22 elicitation techniques were measured based on quality assessment criteria, including time and cost factors, resource effectiveness, and domain understanding. Furthermore, the challenges in Requirements Elicitation were also grouped into eight different categories based on their applicability. Our study effectively contributes in highlighting Software Requirements Elicitation Techniques and its challenges in mobile application development.