Date of Defense

12-11-2019

Date of Graduation

12-2019

Department

Business Information Systems

First Advisor

Kuanchin Chen

Second Advisor

Reza Mousavi

Third Advisor

Mohammad Danshvar Kakhki

Abstract

Requirement Elicitation is a flexible and malleable process that can be changed based upon the requirements of the analyst, stakeholders, and/or the application. In recent years analysts have given more distinction to the effectiveness and the types of result yielded based on the unique attributes of each elicitation technique. These distinctions arose because of advancing technology and use cases used when developing an application. Naturally, the elicitation techniques are advancing as well. They are advancing into different categories to better focus on yielding the right information to identify the right requirements. Such as behavioral techniques, cognitive techniques, contrived techniques, etc.

The aims of this research were to measure the differences in effectiveness of the focus group, repertory grid, card sorting, hierarchical task analysis, and interface analysis techniques when applied to the development of the Lee Honors College mobile application’s second iteration. By conducting techniques from various backgrounds, the requirements elicited will be diverse, robust and exhaustive in regards to the applications improvement based on user cases. Having conducted this research, the findings will be used to improve the application’s end user satisfaction by identifying the real motivations behind stakeholder use of the application.

The elicitation process also highlighted two major limitations in this process. The first being the lack of documentation from the first development cycle to review. This stopped myself from formulating the second round of requirements built off of the previous requirements. The second being the application was not operational while conducting my research. Drawing user cases from memory lacks potency when compared to user cases drawn from stakeholders examining the application from a device currently.

The focus group yielded purely functional requirements; they were based around stakeholders being able to access information independently without interaction with staff members. The repertory grid yielded one major behavioral trait of users. Users were seeking requirements that boost social communication features for the next version of the app. Card sorting yielded the most important requirement was a chat bot for general Q&A and advising. The task analysis technique identified more underlying requirements. The sub tasks of these social communication requirements. The interface analysis technique yielded 5 separate GUI prototypes to increase social communication and independent access to information. These techniques covered multiple genres of elicitation techniques, that’s what is necessary to yield the most effective requirements for future development/improvement of the application.

Access Setting

Honors Thesis-Open Access

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