Melanie J. C. Stade

The Crowd in Requirements Engineering: The Landscape and Challenges

Crowd-based requirements engineering (CrowdRE) could significantly change RE. Performing RE activities such as elicitation with the crowd of stakeholders turns RE into a participatory effort, leads to more accurate requirements, and ultimately boosts software quality. Although any stakeholder in the crowd can contribute, CrowdRE emphasizes one stakeholder group whose role is often trivialized: users. CrowdRE empowers the management of requirements, such as their prioritization and segmentation, in a dynamic, evolved style through collecting and harnessing a continuous flow of user feedback and monitoring data on the usage context. To analyze the large amount of data obtained from the crowd, automated approaches are key. This article presents current research topics in CrowdRE; discusses the benefits, challenges, and lessons learned from projects and experiments; and assesses how to apply the methods and tools in industrial contexts. This article is part of a special issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering.

Feedback Gathering from an Industrial Point of View

Feedback communication channels allow end-users to express their needs, which can be considered in software development and evolution. Although feedback gathering and analysis have been identified as an important topic and several researchers have started their investigation, information is scarce on how software companies currently elicit end-user feedback. In this study, we explore the experiences of software companies with respect to feedback gathering. The results of a case study and online survey indicate two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, most software companies are aware of the relevance of end-user feedback for software evolution and provide feedback channels, which allow end-users to communicate their needs and problems. On the other hand, the quantity and quality of the feedback received varies. We conclude that software companies still do not fully exploit the potential of end-user feedback for software development and evolution.

Features for Mobile Feedback Tools: Applying the KANO Method.

Feedback tools support end-users in communicating needs and problems when using a software system. However, there are no research results available that discuss if the features provided by a feedback tool, such as screenshot annotation options, influence end-users’ satisfaction with the feedback tool. In our study, we used the KANO method to explore the mobile feedback tool features that affect the end-users’ satisfaction with the tool. We analyzed typical feedback features provided by two mobile feedback tools. Each tool was used by a selected number of end-users for a ten-day period. After that, we asked the endusers about their feature preferences and applied the KANO model to categorize the features. The results show that there are certain features that can influence end-users’ opinion about the feedback tool. These research results can help with the design of future mobile feedback tools that optimally support end-users in providing feedback for software systems.

Providing a User Forum is not enough: First Experiences of a Software Company with CrowdRE

Crowd-based requirements engineering (CrowdRE) is promising to derive requirements by gathering and analyzing information from the crowd. Setting up CrowdRE in practice seems challenging, although first solutions to support CrowdRE exist. In this paper, we report on a German software companys experience on crowd involvement by using feedback communication channels and a monitoring solution for user-event data. In our case study, we identified several problem areas that a software company is confronted with to setup an environment for gathering requirements from the crowd. We conclude that a CrowdRE process cannot be implemented ad-hoc and that future work is needed to create and analyze a continuous feedback and monitoring data stream.

Feedback Gathering for Truck Parking Europe: A Pilot Study with the AppEcho Feedback Tool

Feedback communication channels enable end-users to express their needs and problems when using a software system. This feedback can increase a software company’s knowledge about real software usage and can positively affect software evolution and maintenance. However, research shows that gathering feedback can be cumbersome for software companies. In a pilot study with Truck Parking Europe, we explore how we can enable truckers to communicate feedback on an app for parking slots. Results of our pilot study, consisting of a small group of truckers, show that the truckers provided useful feedback through a dedicated, mobile, and screenshot-based feedback tool. As stated by the Truck Parking Europe team, the feedback received is understandable and relevant for improving the parking app. In our future work, we will investigate the extent to which an integrated feedback tool can allow many truckers to provide feedback simultaneously and the extent to which the gathered feedback can aid in improving software evolution and maintenance activities at Truck Parking Europe.

Gathering Requirements for Software Configuration from the Crowd

Todays complex software systems consist of several components that interact in complex ways to provide services to users. In doing so, these systems go through continuous assessment of their context and configure themselves accordingly to keep user satisfaction high. A popular approach to design adaptive software systems is to perform variability modelling, for instance adopting a feature-based approach. Features describe key components and characteristics of a system, which can take different values and be combined in different ways to obtain a system behavior that can best satisfy the needs of different users, who may use the software in different contexts. These design-time models should be complemented by rules that help in deciding when to switch from one valid system configuration to a different one to fit changing user needs or preferences.Eliciting information necessary to build suitable feature models, as well as rules for dynamic reconfigurations that cover relevant scenarios is not an easy task when considering dynamic adaptation in presence of high variability in user profiles. We are experiencing this issue in a project which aims at developing dynamically personalisable software, and specifically a dynamically configurable feedback gathering tool.In this vision paper we propose to use crowdsourcing to elicit knowledge about reconfiguration requirements for dynamically adaptive systems. The proposed approach rests on a two-stage process, which involves the contribution from the crowd of potential system users, as well as from domain experts.