| In this work, we study a health care system with several complex organizations of people that contribute requirements to different teams. Gathering requirements and prioritizing needs versus wants is a challenging balance of strategic goals and resources of time, manpower, and money. In many organizations there are hierarchies of requests and priorities. The time it takes for leadership to prioritize these decisions is often longer than stakeholders expectations. Project approval is generally delayed if there are not enough details to explain the request the first time which leads to stakeholder frustration. Requirements elicitation, also known as requirements gathering, is a preliminary step to the overall analysis process in a systems/software engineering context. Many of the analysts that extract requirements may be subject matter experts in a given area, however, they are untrained in requirements engineering which affects the quality, content, and decisions involved to processing a request. When there is incomplete requirements gathering the result is data redundancy, miscommunication about needs, and a misallocation of resources. This work is the subject of a case study to create a tool that prototypes requirements in terms of their keywords. The focus is to identify the semantic properties of a request in relation to other requests to isolate key terms and identify redundancies. In order to explain the rationale for prototyping requirements, we examine the role of elicitation in the software development life cycle. We consider the traditional methodologies of gathering requirements from large groups of users, and developing models to derive and communicate requirements. The major contributions of this Praxis are a reusable ontology to track the organizations of people contributing requests, web forms to input business needs, and a standard technique for analysts to review requests and derive requirements. The term requirements elicitation refers to a piece of discourse in natural language, by means of which a stakeholder communicates their desired data to an analyst (Tsarfaty, 2014). In order to achieve this goal a tool called CrowdRE that accepts user requests and uses natural language comparison tools to elicit keywords is created. The end result of this praxis is the creation of a requirements model that analysts use to build development prototypes and start formal requirements planning. |
