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4.5 Requirements elicitation and analysis 103

FPO Viewpoints

A viewpoint is way of collecting and organizing a set of requirements from a group of stakeholders who have
something in common. Each viewpoint therefore includes a set of system requirements. Viewpoints might come
from end-users, managers, etc. They help identify the people who can provide information about their
requirements and structure the requirements for analysis.
http://www.SoftwareEngineering-9.com/Web/Requirements/Viewpoints.html

4.5.1 Requirements discovery
Requirements discovery (sometime called requirements elicitation) is the process of
gathering information about the required system and existing systems, and distilling
the user and system requirements from this information. Sources of information dur-
ing the requirements discovery phase include documentation, system stakeholders,
and specifications of similar systems. You interact with stakeholders through inter-
views and observation and you may use scenarios and prototypes to help stakehold-
ers understand what the system will be like.
Stakeholders range from end-users of a system through managers to external stake-
holders such as regulators, who certify the acceptability of the system. For example,
system stakeholders for the mental healthcare patient information system include:

1. Patients whose information is recorded in the system.
2. Doctors who are responsible for assessing and treating patients.
3. Nurses who coordinate the consultations with doctors and administer some
treatments.
4. Medical receptionists who manage patients’ appointments.
5. IT staff who are responsible for installing and maintaining the system.

6. A medical ethics manager who must ensure that the system meets current ethi-
cal guidelines for patient care.
7. Healthcare managers who obtain management information from the system.

8. Medical records staff who are responsible for ensuring that system information
can be maintained and preserved, and that record keeping procedures have been
properly implemented.

In addition to system stakeholders, we have already seen that requirements may
also come from the application domain and from other systems that interact with the
system being specified. All of these must be considered during the requirements
elicitation process.
These different requirements sources (stakeholders, domain, systems) can all be
represented as system viewpoints with each viewpoint showing a subset of the