Research Article
Attributes-Based Decision Making for Selection of Requirement
Elicitation Techniques Using the Analytic Network Process
JinyuLi ,
1
AsifUllah,
2
JunLi,
1
ShahNazir ,
2
HabibUllahKhan ,
3
HanifUrRehman,
4
andAminUlHaq
5
1
School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Lanzhou Jiaotong University, Lanzhou 730070, China
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Swabi, Swabi, Pakistan
3
Department of Accounting & Information Systems College of Business & Economics Qatar, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar
4
Department of Computer Science, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Mardan, Pakistan
5
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
Correspondence should be addressed to Jinyu Li; jinyuli078@163.com
Received 12 May 2020; Revised 24 July 2020; Accepted 7 August 2020; Published 8 September 2020
Guest Editor: Erkan Celik
Copyright © 2020 Jinyu Li et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which
permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. e
publication of this article was funded by Qatar National Library.
Requirement engineering is the first phase of software engineering. In requirement engineering, the first phase is requirement
elicitation (RE), which is the most critical and error-prone activity. In this phase, the requirements are extracted from various
sources; after extraction, they are analyzed and documented for a specific purpose of software development. In RE, process
requirements from stakeholders are gathered, upon which the entire software product failure and success are dependent. In order
to accomplish the goal of requirement elicitation, various techniques are used. However, the selection of these techniques is a very
challenging task, as one technique may suit a situation but may not be suited for other situations. Besides this, project attributes
such as documentation culture of organization, degree of relationship among stakeholders, and familiarity to domain also have a
great impact on the process of technique selection. e reason is that there is no empirical value of the techniques that provide help
in techniques selection to analyze the basis software project attributes. is study proposed the analytic network process, which is
one of the multicriteria decision making processes for the elicitation technique selection process with respect to criterion attributes
of project. e motivation toward the use of the ANP approach for the selection of requirement selection technique is that there
are dependencies existing among attributes of the project elements. So, the ANP approach is capable of dealing with such
situations where dependencies and complexity occur. Results of the proposed study demonstrate that the technique helps in
complex situations where decision making is difficult based on the alternatives.
1.Introduction
e most important phase in developing software is re-
quirement engineering, which combines different tasks of
the developing system in order to gather requirements,
taking into account the requirements of multiple stake-
holders who have variations. RE is a complicated, practical,
social, and intellectual process, which produces the software
system requirements [1, 2]. Requirement gathering is known
as the most complicated process and requires a lot of skills
for the software development [3]. Instead of this,
inappropriate requirement elicitation leads the software
development process to failure and late product delivery.
e main objective of the elicitation technique(s), used to
elicit requirements, is to discover many possible issues in the
process requirement gathering, which, in turn, facilitates
obtaining appropriate software product for stakeholders,
which can fulfill their requirements [4]. In industry, different
techniques are used to collect most adequate requirements of
a specific software project. However, the most suitable
technique selection requires in-depth knowledge of the
problem domain, techniques available, and requirement
Hindawi
Mathematical Problems in Engineering
Volume 2020, Article ID 2156023, 13 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2020/2156023