National College of Maynooth: Website and Student Portal Requirements

This report focuses on requirements elicitation for the redesign of the National College of Maynooth's website and student portal. It explores various elicitation techniques, including interviews with stakeholders (students, staff, and administrators), brainstorming sessions, questionnaires, observation of existing features, and document analysis. The report outlines the procedures and considerations for each technique, such as preparing interview questions, defining brainstorming objectives, and analyzing existing system documentation. The recommendations classify requirements into functional (login, course details, alumni information), non-functional (usability, security), and user-based expectations. The report emphasizes the importance of security controls to mitigate risks and the use of UI design principles to meet user expectations. The goal is to create a website and portal that meets the needs of all stakeholders and improves the user experience. The report also provides references to relevant research papers.

National college of maynooth
Requirements
Elicitation

Requirements Elicitation
Table of Contents
Introduction....................................................................................................................................................2
Requirements Elicitation................................................................................................................................2
Interviews...................................................................................................................................................2
Brainstorming............................................................................................................................................3
Questionnaire/Surveys...............................................................................................................................3
Observations..............................................................................................................................................4
Document Analysis....................................................................................................................................4
Recommendations & Conclusion..................................................................................................................5
References......................................................................................................................................................7
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Requirements Elicitation
Introduction
National College of Maynooth is looking to re-design and improve its website and the student portal.
There are many requirements that are associated with the website that need to be addressed and the
requirements will be better collected and understood from the use of various elicitation techniques. The
document is a requirements elicitation report for the website and has been written after the analysis of the
various techniques that are applicable.
Requirements Elicitation
There are various techniques that may be used for the requirements elicitation of the website. These
techniques and the method of their execution have been described below.
Interviews
One of the most important and widely used techniques for the elicitation of the requirements is
interviews. In case of the website for National College of Maynooth, there will be many stakeholders
associated with the company in terms of the students, staff members, and director of the college, parents
and families of the students, administrative staff and many more.
All of these entities will be able to provide a lot of detail on the website related requirements in terms of
the functional specification, system qualities and user expectations (Taheri et al., 2017).
There are also external technical associates and business analysts that may be contacted and interviewed
to gain a better picture of the requirements.
The interview steps and procedures that shall be followed are as listed below:
 The list of the stakeholders and entities that shall be interviewed must be prepared.
 The interview questions shall be prepared to extract the details of the information and
requirements from each of the interviewee. For instance, some of the interview questions for
students are as listed below:
o What are the primary activities that you perform or desire to perform on the student
portal?
o What are the platforms that you wish to use to access the portal and the website?
o What are the current problems that you have observed in the current website that has
been in use? (Menendez and Silva, 2016)
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Requirements Elicitation
o What are the login methods that you would wish to use on the website?
o How many times do you access the college website in a day?
o Would you wish the website to be available at any hour of the day or for specific time
periods?
o What are the social media platforms that you would wish to be integrated on the portal?
o Are you aware of the security practices and methods that you as a user must follow so
that the information and network security is maintained and assured?
 The interview timings and locations shall be circulated to the attendees of the interview.
 The reminders must be sent two days prior to the interview.
 The interview shall be conducted by asking the questions as per the list prepared.
 The response that is provided shall be noted down in the form of notes and not all the information
must be written.
 The notes and key points shall then be analyzed to come up with the requirements and discoveries
from these sessions.
Brainstorming
Another useful elicitation technique that may be used in the case of the website for National College of
Maynooth shall be brainstorming sessions.
These sessions and activities are carried out in groups of different stakeholders. For instance, in this case
a number of students from different departments may be invited for the conduction of these sessions.
There are creative and innovative ideas that get highlighted during these sessions which may allow an
easy understanding of different aspects of the requirements (El-Thalji and Jantunen, 2012).
It would be essential to carry out certain pre-defined activities and tasks so that the success of these
sessions can be ensured. There must be determination of the objectives of these sessions so that the
execution and discussion proceeds accordingly. There shall also be a time limit that must be specified on
these sessions so that only the requirements around the website and the student portal are discussed.
During the session, the analysts must take a note of key points that are raised by the participants and the
response received for every point by others (Muqeem, 2012).
Once the session is complete, these points shall be analyzed and the requirements that are identified shall
be noted down.
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Requirements Elicitation
Questionnaire/Surveys
These requirements elicitation techniques are most applicable when there are a large number of users that
are involved with the particular system or project.
In this case also, there are different groups and entities involved from different areas, such as students,
administration, families, faculty members etc. In this requirements elicitation technique, a list of questions
are prepared and these questions are the simple and direct ones, most of which can be answered with a
simple yes or no. The information that is provided as a response to these questions is also quantifiable in
nature.
The questions that will be covered in the questionnaire will allow the system designers and analysts to
understand the system behavior in terms of the expected non-functional requirements and system qualities
(Rahman and Sahibuddin, 2013).
The response that will be to the questionnaire circulated to the stakeholders will then be assessed to find
out the requirements for the website and for the student portal as well.
Observations
There are features and functionalities that are already implemented in the website that is being used in the
organization.
These features and functionalities will be required to be understood so that the areas of improvements and
the expectations of the users from the website can be understood. Observation is a requirements
elicitation technique in which the existing practices and data sets are analyzed and the maximum
information is attempted to be captured (Mulla, 2012). The more the information is collected during the
observation of the existing features and legacy systems, the more time will be spent by the analysts for the
analysis of the information. There are automated tools that have been designed which may be used for
this purpose.
The observation of the current website, documentation available with the national college, user feedback
on the current system, the current system features and functionalities etc. will provide information on the
improvements that need to be done.
Document Analysis
The fifth technique that may be used and applied in the case of requirements elicitation for National
College of Maynooth is Document Analysis.
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Requirements Elicitation
It is the process in which the different documents and reports that are available in association with the
website and the student portal shall be analyzed to discover and gather the specifications to be
implemented (Wang, 2011).
There may cases wherein the stakeholders may not be able to give time for the conduction of the
brainstorming or interview sessions. Also, there may be a restricted privilege provided to observe the
existing systems. In such cases, document analysis can be used which will allow the analysts and the
designers to get a hold of the system features, expectations and behavior.
There may be documents available with the national college in terms of the system logs and reports,
database design and diagrams, user comments and reviews along with the detailed feedback provided by
the users (Dieste and Juristo, 2011).
These documents shall be analyzed and reviewed by the members of the project team so that they may be
able to understand all of the requirements and specifications clearly.
Recommendations & Conclusion
After the identification and execution of the requirements elicitation techniques for the website and
student portal of the National College of Maynooth, it has been recommended that the requirement areas
must be classified in three categories as functional requirements, non-functional requirements and user
based requirements.
The functional requirements of the website must ensure that there is login functionality implemented
along with the implementation of the features such as ability to view the course details offered by the
college, alumni details, placement information, faculty details, facilities provided to the students and
many more. The student portal shall allow the students to register for a particular course, pay their fee for
the course, check their attendance, manage their learning material etc. The members of the staff shall be
able to upload the lectures and the grades of the students, track the student attendance, and provide their
remarks and many more. The administrative users must be able to set up the privileges for the users.
The logout and social media integration shall be ensured for the website and for the student portal. There
are many of the system qualities that shall also be integrated in the website and the student portal. Some
of these non-functional requirements include usability, reliability, performance supportability,
adaptability, maintainability and security.
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Requirements Elicitation
There can be a number of security risks and attacks that may take place and occur in association with the
website and the student portal. The security risks and occurrences shall be prevented and avoided by
making use of different security controls and parameters. These controls include preventive, adaptive,
reactive, detective and monitoring controls. All of these controls will have logical checks and
administrative checks for the protection and security of the data and the networks. The user expectations
shall also be met by making use of UI design principles and methods.
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Requirements Elicitation
References
Dieste, O. and Juristo, N. (2011). Systematic review and aggregation of empirical studies on
elicitation techniques. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 37(2), pp.283-304.
El-Thalji, I. and Jantunen, E. (2012). On the Development of Condition Based Maintenance
Strategy for Offshore Wind Farm: Requirement Elicitation Process. Energy Procedia, 24,
pp.328-339.
Menendez, D. and Silva, P. (2016). A Requirement Elicitation Process for BI Projects. Lecture
Notes on Software Engineering, 4(1), pp.20-26.
Mulla, N. (2012). A New Approach to Requirement Elicitation Based on Stakeholder
Recommendation andCollaborative Filtering. International Journal of Software Engineering &
Applications, 3(3), pp.51-60.
Muqeem, M. (2012). NVC Based Model for Selecting Effective Requirement Elicitation
Technique. International Journal of Software Engineering & Applications, 3(5), pp.157-165.
Rahman, N. and Sahibuddin, S. (2013). A Systematic Mapping Study on Requirements
Elicitation Techniques in Collaborative Application. Lecture Notes on Software Engineering,
pp.106-111.
Taheri, L., Shafazand, M., Pa, N. and Abdullah, R. (2017). A knowledge audit model for
requirement elicitation: A case study to assess knowledge in requirement elicitation. Knowledge
and Process Management.
Wang, Y. (2011). Knowledge Guided Software Trustworthiness Requirements Elicitation.
Chinese Journal of Computers, 34(11), pp.2165-2175.
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