Guiding the Process of Requirements Elicitation with a Semiotic-based Approach A Case Study

Requirements Engineering (RE) is the process of discovering the purpose of a prospective software system, by identifying stakeholders and their needs, and documenting these in a form that is suitable to analysis, communication, and subsequent implementation. Requirements elicitation is closely related and even interleaved to other RE activities such as: modeling, analysis & negotiation, and communication of requirements. RE is a multidisciplinary and human-centered activity. This paper presents a participatory approach to requirements elicitation that deals with functional and non-functional requirements considering social, political, cultural and ethical issues involved in understanding the problem in the process of RE. The proposed approach is theoretically grounded in methods and models from Organizational Semiotics. The proposed approach is illustrated with a case study related to the development of an application of Geographical Information Systems in the Web (Web GIS). Results of the case study allowed us to observe the contribution of OS in the proposed approach, including elements to inform the user interface design of the system.

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