Are Stakeholders the Only Source of Information for Requirements Engineers? Toward a Taxonomy of Elicitation Information Sources

Requirements elicitation consists in collecting and documenting information about the requirements from a system-to-be and about the environment of that system. Elicitation forms a critical step in the design of any information system, subject to many challenges like information incompleteness, variability, or ambiguity. To deal with these challenges, requirements engineers heavily rely on stakeholders, who turn out to be one of the most significant provider of information during elicitation. Sometimes, this comes at the cost of less attention being paid by engineers to other sources of information accessible in a business. In this article, we try to deal with this issue by studying the different sources of information that can be used by engineers when designing a system. We propose TELIS (a Taxonomy of Elicitation Sources), which can be used during elicitation to review more systematically the sources of information about a system-to-be. TELIS was produced through a series of empirical studies and was partially validated through a real-world case study. Our objective in this article is to increase the awareness of engineers about the other information providers within a business. Ultimately, we believe our taxonomy may help in better dealing with classical elicitation challenges and increase the chances of successful information systems design.