Supporting user-analyst interaction in functional requirements elicitation

A critical phase in the task of software engineering is represented by the elicitation of requirements from the users. The paper presents a cognitive approach to the elicitation of functional requirements of software systems founded on the modelling of the application domain. The framework outlined is grounded on an incremental process aimed at building a description of the real world, as perceived by the user and expressed in an informal way, in terms of physical objects and activities on them. The domain model is developed by applying the analyst stereotypical knowledge to the real world as described by the user, and requires the identification of knowledge chunks that may consent the process of specification reuse in different application domains