Approach and case study of requirement analysis where end users take an active role

In the traditional approach to software analysis, systems analysts interview end users to capture requirements. The authors propose an approach called automated user requirements acquisition (AURA) where end users take an active role in analysis by identifying requirements. This approach takes advantage of end users domain knowledge. AURA uses a question-and-answer model to guide end users in describing their problem. Additionally, AURA provides problem domain knowledge to suggest answers for the questions. The business application domain was selected to explain and demonstrate the approach. While the AURA approach can benefit any analysis technique, an object-oriented analysis technique was selected as the underlying method. A prototype tool, AURA-BIZ, was developed to demonstrate AURA in the business domain. AURA-BIZ was evaluated through a case study where end users created the analyses of their business problem. The data collected showed that the end users successfully modeled their problem by following the questions and using the suggestions