In requirements engineering (RE), an early yet critical activity consists in eliciting the requirements from various stakeholders, who usually have different assumptions, knowledge, and intentions. The goal during elicitation is to understand what stakeholders expect from a given software, expectations which then feed the analysis, prioritization, validation, and ultimately specification activities of the RE process. Elicitation is an interactive activity. It relies on verbal communication of statements of stakeholders about their requirements, their ideas, their assumptions, the constraints they know apply in the environment of the future software, and so forth. Statements, we claim, build either on a past experience of the stakeholder or are the result of reasoning from indirect experience, i.e., they have different grounds. In this paper, we introduce the concept of “Statement Ground” during RE, contrast it with the classical perspective on requirements elicitation, and position the concept in existing RE literature. We conduct an empirical assessment of the relative qualities of statements that have different grounds. Our work results in a better understanding of the statements produced by stakeholders during requirements elicitation, of their qualities, and of the interplay between those qualities and the concept of statement ground. It also results in the definition of a series of research questions which focus on the implications of our findings on the overall requirements engineering activity.

中文翻译：

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需求背后是什么？需求获取中陈述理由的质量评估

在需求工程 (RE) 中，一项早期但关键的活动包括从通常具有不同假设、知识和意图的不同利益相关者那里获取需求。启发期间的目标是了解利益相关者对给定软件的期望，期望然后为 RE 过程的分析、优先级排序、验证和最终规范活动提供信息。引出是一种互动活动。它依赖于利益相关者关于他们的需求、他们的想法、他们的假设、他们知道应用于未来软件环境的约束等的口头交流。我们声称，陈述要么建立在利益相关者过去的经验之上，要么是间接经验推理的结果，即它们有不同的根据。在本文中，我们在 RE 中引入了“Statement Ground”的概念，将其与需求获取的经典观点进行对比，并将该概念定位在现有的 RE 文献中。我们对具有不同理由的陈述的相对质量进行了实证评估。我们的工作有助于更好地理解利益相关者在需求获取期间产生的陈述、他们的质量以及这些质量与陈述基础概念之间的相互作用。它还导致了一系列研究问题的定义，这些问题集中在我们的发现对整体需求工程活动的影响上。我们对具有不同理由的陈述的相对质量进行了实证评估。我们的工作有助于更好地理解利益相关者在需求获取期间产生的陈述、他们的质量以及这些质量与陈述基础概念之间的相互作用。它还导致了一系列研究问题的定义，这些问题集中在我们的发现对整体需求工程活动的影响上。我们对具有不同理由的陈述的相对质量进行了实证评估。我们的工作有助于更好地理解利益相关者在需求获取期间产生的陈述、他们的质量以及这些质量与陈述基础概念之间的相互作用。它还导致了一系列研究问题的定义，这些问题集中在我们的发现对整体需求工程活动的影响上。