Expediting acquisition of high quality customer level requirements

Successful software projects begin with the definition of accurate and complete customer level requirements, agreed upon and understood by both customer and software development team. This paper describes an approach for developing a software tool that expedites the acquisition of such high quality customer level requirements by (1) promoting collaboration between customers and developers, (2) documenting requirements in a form which facilitates understanding and communication, and (3) providing knowledge-based utilities that assist in requirements elicitation. Our approach is based on a collaborative knowledge modeling tool using graphical multimedia representation for eliciting and representing the requirements. We present a scenario to illustrate power of this graphical requirement models and discuss work required to ensure its impacts on real practices.