Requirements trawling: techniques for discovering requirements

If you approach someone in the street and ask for directions then, provided that person knows the way and speaks the same language as you do, it shoul d be easy for him to help you. But often, when you try to follow the direct ions, you become more confused and lost. Perhaps the person giving the dire ctions has assumed that you know about a local landmark or has forgotten to mention that there is another small street on the left before the one you are seeking. Or maybe the director has not understood your request and has sent you to a place with a similar name... there are so many reasons why th e transfer of information from one person to another is fraught with diffic ulties. When you try to discover the requirements for any kind of product the diffi culties are even more complex because the source of the requirements is not just one person, it is all of the people who are stakeholders in the proje ct. Moreover, all of these people have their own view of what is important, along with their own experience, prejudices and views of the world. Consid ering the variations between your sources of requirements (stakeholders) it makes sense to have a variety of techniques for discovering the requiremen ts. We call these as trawling techniques because, like fishing, we run a ne t through the organization and trap as many requirements as we can. Then, u sing the appropriate technique, we identify the relevant requirements (the juicy codfish) and separate them from the irrelevant (the minnows). We also look for rare and amazing fish that nobody has ever seen before. We are no t just concerned with finding existing requirements, we are also concerned with generating new requirements by using techniques that encourage creativ ity. This paper summarizes a number of techniques that wet have found usefu l when trawling for requirements. (C) 2001 Academic Press.