Towards Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering A Research Preview

Abstract

Abstract. [Context and motivation]Stakeholders who are highly distributed form a large, heterogeneous online group, the so-called "crowd". The rise of mobile, social and cloud apps has led to a stark increase in crowd-based settings. [Question/problem] Traditional requirements engineering (RE) techniques face scalability issues and require the co-presence of stakeholders and engineers, which cannot be realized in a crowd setting. While different approaches have recently been introduced to partially automate RE in this context, a multi-method approach to (semi-)automate all RE activities is still needed. [Principal ideas/results]We propose "Crowd-based Requirements Engineering" as an approach that integrates existing elicitation and analysis techniques and fills existing gaps by introducing new concepts. It collects feedback through direct interactions and social collaboration, and by deploying mining techniques.[Contribution] This paper describes the initial state of the art of our approach, and previews our plans for further research. IntroductionOffering services and applications online opens the way to a potentially large market, but competition is high in this field. This pressures developers and service providers into continuously exciting their customers with positive interactions and innovations in order to prevent them from switching to competitive solutions. Requirements engineering (RE) plays a pivotal role in mapping and anticipating the stakeholders' needs. However, traditional RE techniques depend on co-presence (i.e., on the analyst(s) and stakeholder(s) gathered at the same time and place) and therefore do not scale well to settings with many distributed stakeholders [1]. As online users are physically distributed, remote RE techniques are required that allow the analyst(s) and the many stakeholders to be active in different places and at different times [2]. Existing techniques in the area of remote RE techniques rely on (semi-)automating aspects of RE (e.g., [2,3]), but the greatest challenge is to bridge the gaps between them in an integrated approach. We argue in this paper that research has so far focused on particular sub-domains and has not approached this field holistically

Crowd Intelligence in Requirements Engineering: Current Status and Future Directions

“…By crowd [48,54,72], by textual data analysis [13,20,25,33,41,42,49,51,52,62,64,80,86,88,89], by prototyping [22], sentiment analysis [21,79], image and unstructured data analysis [21,73] 22…”

“…Monitoring [2,20,73,75,93], adaption [3,26,55], evolution [25,45,66,85], discovery [81], context [21,42,48]…”

QREME – Quality Requirements Management Model for Supporting Decision-Making

“…In the end, the resulting product is evaluated against the original ideas and goals. Today, feedback-driven or bottom-up approaches are gaining momentum, often supported by data-driven approaches [21] or crowd-based approaches [22]. Objective data usage can remove subjectivity from the product managers [23].…”

The Crowd in Requirements Engineering: The Landscape and Challenges

“…qualities, leading to the identification of functional and nonfunctional requirements. 9 Projects such as PRO-OPT (see the sidebar) and Opti4Apps (opti4apps.de) are developing such functionality. Researchers are also investigating how to automatically generate models that capture the key elements of naturallanguage requirements.…”

“…9 Normally, the crowd is an undefined group of people. 10 But for CrowdRE, the crowd is in most cases a large group of current or potential users of a software product who interact among themselves or with representatives of a software company (for example, the product owner or development team).…”