A model for eliciting user requirements specific to South African rural areas

  • Authors:

  • Naomi Isabirye;Stephen Flowerday

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Fort Hare, East London;University of Fort Hare, East London

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 annual research conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists on IT research in developing countries: riding the wave of technology
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Dwesa is a rural town situated in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province. Its residents are plagued with the challenges of poverty, poor access to public services, unemployment and low levels of literacy. A project is currently underway in Dwesa to develop an E-Commerce platform that will 'connect' the residents with the necessary access to services and markets by providing them with the necessary tools in order to help in alleviating some of their challenges. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate existing requirements elicitation techniques and methodologies in the context of rural information technology implementations. The primary objective is to develop a model for user requirements elicitation in Dwesa. Many requirements elicitation techniques and frameworks exist, but few have been evaluated in the context of rural software implementations. Furthermore, requirements elicitation techniques should not be applied simply as steps to gather information. Instead this paper proposes a model that can be applied to assimilate the contribution of knowledge regarding the stakeholders, problem and solution characteristics, and other characteristics into the software development process for the effective elicitation of requirements.