A Support Environment for Requirements Acquisition of Information Systems Using Visual Representations

Abstract

It is difficult for developers of information systems to acquire the user's requirements. This paper proposes a system to support communications between developers and users under the development of information systems for the work fields with no definitely-defined processes. It supports their communications by making the user's requirements visible. First, the users represent their requirements using object icons. Next, they input “functions” and “the reasons why they are needed” to the cards corresponding to these objects. We classify the objects in terms of their characteristics and the relations between these objects. By this classification and keywords that are defined according to the relations, the support system can check the adequacy of the representations as the user's requirements. The developers can identify the user's requirements in early phases and get the requirements specification automatically. We evaluated and examined the support by implementing a prototype of this system.