What is Requirements Elicitation?

In requirements engineering, requirements elicitation is the practice of researching and discovering the requirements of a system from users, customers, and other stakeholders. The practice is also sometimes referred to as “requirement gathering”. – Wikipedia

• You perform various activities (elicitation techniques) to get the business requirements.
• You also understand the stakeholder’s expectations and system constraints while eliciting the requirements.
• The primary objective is to understand and identify the stakeholder’s needs by asking them researched and structured questions.
• They may not know what exactly they want and hence it’s your job as a BA to guide them by asking them the right questions.
• You identify what they are doing presently and how they want the system/process to be in the future.
• Requirements elicitation deals with the “What” of solving a problem. Hence in this phase, you identify what the system is doing and what the system should do in the future.
• You don’t deal with the “How” of solving a problem. Hence, you don’t draw various models and apply other design techniques to go in-depth with understanding the requirements. You do that in the analysis phase.
• The requirements gathered in this phase are not final and hence you cannot submit it as a formal document. There are 3 more phases (Analysis, Organisation, and Validation) in which you have to further refine the requirements and then submit it as the final completed Requirements Document e.g. Business Requirements Document (BRD)

The post is  based on my notes and understanding from this BA tutorial