The Communication Between Client-Developer in the Process of Requirements Elicitation for a Software Project

Abstract

Communication is a fundamental part of the requirements elicitation process for a software project, but the constant changes in the requirements make it difficult to complete a project successfully, and sometimes the customer’s expectations are not met. The problem of communication has different reasons, among them, the shortcomings in the process by which the requirements engineer contacts the customer and the customer does not always have a clear idea of what he really needs. In order to identify the reasons for the communication problems between the requirements engineer and the customer, we have carried out a survey with the participation of employees from two software development companies. The results show the comparison and contrast of the effectiveness of the traditional processes against the current processes in the same way, we can highlight the preference of the experts when choosing a method of elicitation against another one and the advantages and disadvantages that each one represents. We also get results about how to improve the processes that present the greatest number of problems. In addition, it is worth mentioning that results were also obtained regarding how professionals recognize when there is a problem between the developer and the client or vice versa and the possible solution that should be applied to avoid some kind of conflict in the medium or long term in the software’s development project.