An Approach to Understand and Elicit Requirements using Systemic Models: Ensuring a Connect from Problem Context to Requirements

The context in which Businesses operate today is becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the influence of the various factors such as societal, political, economical, regulatory, cultural, and technological on the business. For IT organizations focusing on next generation systems, the ability to understand and cope with this complexity is needed to elicit correct business requirements to build effective solutions. Research studies have highlighted “requirements creep and gaps” to be a major cause of many software systems problems. The inability to comprehend these business systems leads to a lot of rework at later stages including shelving of the projects in some scenarios. Research carried out in our lab to address this problem, led to the design of an approach that begins with the big picture understanding of the business, identifies suitable business objectives which are traced to business processes for realization and elicits corresponding requirements. It comprises multiple models which include a qualitative cybernetic model to understand the context with all its influences and a stakeholder model to derive the business objectives based on stakeholder perspective. The paper outlines the approach encapsulated in a methodology to establish connect from the business context to the elicited requirements for solution development along with a case illustration.