Agent-based Support for Requirements Elicitation
CR Coulin, Didar Zowghi · UTS ePRESS (University of Technology Sydney) · 2003
The elicitation of requirements is a difficult and expensive process but critical to the overall success of any system development. So far relatively little work has been devoted to providing intelligent tool support for this complex and labor-intensive activity. The quality of requirements from the elicitation process currently depends greatly on the experience and expertise of the participating requirements engineers, and the commitment and cooperation of the system stakeholders. In this paper we describe an agent-based approach to intelligent tool support for requirements elicitation. Given the multiple roles a requirements engineer must perform during elicitation, we suggest a multi-agent system may be developed as an intelligent assistant for this process. It is proposed that some of the tasks performed by requirements engineers during the elicitation process may be supported and in some cases automated by individual agents or several agents working cooperatively. It is expected that the use of intelligent agents would produce better requirements in terms of their completeness, correctness, consistency and clarity. This would be achieved partly by improving the elicitation process through greater efficiency with respect to time and cost, and increased effectiveness by way of rigorous and structured execution.