Requirements elicitation approaches: A systematic review

In recent years, the Requirements Engineering community has dedicated a lot of efforts in order to tackle the Requirements Elicitation (RE) problem. Although important advances have been reached, the RE processes still present challenges that remain between the most critical research topics in the Requirements Engineering community agenda. In order to understand the progress that has been made in the RE field we ask: what approaches exist which supports RE in software development processes? To answer this question we have made a systematic review of works performed during the last 25 years (1989 – 2014) resulting in 497 publications. From these results, this paper reports on the main characteristics of each proposal like: purpose, sources of requirements required, target produced, type of knowledge representation used, and types of resources, methods and tools required to accomplish their goal. We also identify the prominent issues of interest for the researchers, and the most influential works and trends over time. We argue that the results of this work are relevant toward understanding the state of the art in RE, providing insights on the relevant issues and perspectives that should be considered in future proposals.