What Is the Process? A Metamodel of the Requirements Elicitation Process Derived from a Systematic Literature Review

Requirements elicitation is a fundamental process in software engineering, essential for aligning software products with user needs and project objectives. As software projects become more complex, effective elicitation methods are vital for capturing accurate and comprehensive requirements. Despite the variety of available elicitation methods, practitioners face persistent challenges such as capturing tacit knowledge, managing diverse stakeholder needs, and addressing ambiguities in requirements. Moreover, although elicitation is recognized as a core process for gathering and analyzing system objectives, there is a lack of a unified and systematic framework to guide practitioners—especially newcomers—through the activity. To address these challenges, we provide a comprehensive analysis of existing elicitation methods, aiming to contribute to better alignment between software products and project objectives, ultimately improving software engineering practices. We do so by performing a systematic literature review identifying crosscutting steps, common techniques, tools, and approaches that define the core activities of the elicitation process. We synthesize our findings into a metamodel that structures software elicitation processes. This review uncovers various elicitation methods—such as collaborative workshops, interviews, and prototyping—each demonstrating unique strengths in different project contexts. It also highlights significant limitations, including stakeholder misalignment and incomplete requirements capture, which continue to reduce the effectiveness of elicitation processes. Finally, our study seeks to contribute to understanding requirements elicitation methods by providing a comprehensive view of their current strengths and limitations through a metamodel enabling the structuring and optimization of elicitation processes.