SHF: Small: RUI: Before, during, and after requirements elicitation interviews: a comprehensive support for improving the quality of requirements

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Requirements engineering is the set of activities concerned with determining and communicating the expectations for a new or modified product, and the contexts in which it will be used. Requirements elicitation, i.e., the practice of collecting these features, called requirements, is the first of these activities and is recognized as a critical and difficult stage in the development of software systems. Among the available elicitation techniques, interviews with stakeholders are the most commonly used in practice. Normally, they involve two actors: a customer and a requirements analyst; and their goal is to allow the knowledge transfer from the first to the second one so that the analyst can collect precise, correct, and complete requirements. The importance of interviews is widely recognized and many of the factors that might affect the knowledge transfer in interviews have been analyzed. However, a comprehensive approach to improve the effectiveness and the quality of requirements elicitation interviews has not been studied yet. This research aims at filling this gap by providing a set of novel techniques and tools to support the analyst before, during, and after the interview.The "before support" is concretized in developing a training for students and inexperienced analysts to teach them, with a hands-on approach, how to perform interviews, how to avoid the most common mistakes, and how to recognize ambiguous situations and exploit them to discover hidden knowledge. This part of the research includes also the creation of a course for undergraduate students to allow them to better develop their skills as analysts. The "during support" is a tool-based approach which uses biofeedback and voice analysis to help the analyst during the interview in identifying the increasing level of frustration in the customer, which might cause mistrust in the analyst. Finally, the "after support" consists of a protocol that uses an external observer to analyze recorded interviews to extract additional knowledge from them and possibly to identify additional common mistakes. This research has the potential to dramatically improve the requirements elicitation process, and consequently the software development process. This can lead to better software, thus benefiting the large segment of the population that uses and relies on software.