Problems of Scope-Requirement Elicitation II

If requirements elicitation begins without an appreciation for organizational context, then a number of restricting assumptions are made due to “misconceptions, management politics, technical ignorance, mistrust, established practices, personnel resistance, ...”
Environmental factors have a strong influence on requirements elicitation “The process for eliciting the work-group and end-user requirements are premised on the notion that sound and accurate descriptions of the users and their environment is at first
necessary.” Environmental factors include:
• hardware and software constraints imposed on a target system (the target
system will typically be a component of some larger system with an existing
or required architecture already in place)
• the maturity of the target system’s domain
• the certainty of the target system’s interfaces to the larger system
• the target system’s role within a larger system

Environmental constraints are introduced because the system under development is rarely a stand-alone system but instead must interface with a larger system. This premise allows the requirements engineer to restrict the requirements analysis to the universe of discourse established by this larger system.
Environmental constraints can have a profound impact on the requirements elicitation process. The specialization of this process to a particular architecture or domain allows requirements elicitation to focus on problems that either have lower priority or do not exist in other application domains“performing requirements analysis for an application area may require specific methods and tools that are not necessary for other types of application.”


The project context also affects the requirements and requirements engineering process.
Project factors include:
• the attributes of the different stakeholder communities, such as the end
users, sponsors, developers, and requirements analysts. Examples of such
attributes are:
• management style
• management hierarchy
• domain experience
• computer experience
• the constraints imposed by the people involved in the elicitation process, e.g., managerial constraints concerning cost, time, and desired quality in the target system.