A Proposal of Metrics for Software Requirements Elicitation in the Context of a Small-Sized Software Enterprise

The requirements elicitation process aims to obtain a preliminary version of the requirements before their specification. However, due the nature of this process, it is very difficult to know if the elicited requirements have quality. Furthermore, there are some metrics that allow requirements engineers to measure some aspects of the elicitation process and its final product (i.e., a preliminary version of the requirements, also called pre-requirements), however there is no way of measuring and controlling the elicited pre-requirements. With the aim of understanding, evaluating, and improving the requirements elicitation process, the existing metrics for this process have been analyzed and, as a consequence, eight metrics using the GQM paradigm are proposed. Additionally, a preliminary validation of these metrics has been performed in the context of a small-sized software enterprise. The obtained results are also presented.