A study on the software requirements elicitation issues - its causes and effects

Software requirements elicitation is an important and essential pre-requisite to the subsequent phases in software development lifecycle. There is an increasing focus on how industry performs elicitation as this has a direct influence on the overall project success. It is important to understand broader elicitation issues and challenges, and address them on a large-scale, especially on geographically distributed software development. There are studies focusing on elicitation, but they are relatively small. There is no substantial research related to providing a comprehensive view of elicitation issues along with its causes and effects. This paper attempts to provide a summary of the systematic literature review (SLR) findings from 81 papers. The findings are based on causes of poor elicitation, elicitation issues and challenges, consequences of poor elicitation, advisable practices and classification of elicitation issues. The authors have leveraged cause-and-effect diagrams to draw conclusions on SLR.