Requirements elicitation (RE) is the most critical phase in requirement engineering. It is the phase, in which analysts elicit, understand and validate the requirements of a system from stakeholders. Quite a number of existing strategies, tools and techniques are widely employed by software engineers to gather user requirements. However, these approaches have some drawbacks, which make the analysts to face some problems during the elicitation process. This is mainly due to the lack of knowledge about the features of those approaches. This paper analyses a number of requirement elicitation techniques in order to understand their unique features. The effectiveness of those requirements elicitation techniques is compared to gain in-depth knowledge about them. In addition, the paper also discusses a survey, which was conducted to know the current practice of RE techniques and the factors that affect their selection.