Businesses need to satisfy their customers’ needs. Since companies are innovating rapidly due to for example Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and Machine Learning, they need to keep up with this innovation to be ahead of competitors. In order to do this they need to know what the customers want. A new concept of crowd-based Requirements Engineering is mentioned in literature where a large group of users are continuously involved in the developing process. This crowd provides user feedback through feedback-channels. The crowd needs to be intrinsically motivated. Data from users is also collected from monitoring systems and provides context and usage data. This can be used to get insights in users’ behavior and what they want.
As mentioned, this concept is new and mainly mentioned in literature. In practice this type of Requirements Engineering is not acknowledged yet. Although it might seem promising, there are some challenges that arise. For example, the users must be able to decide what level of privacy they want. Therefore the monitoring systems must take into account what, where and how data can be collected. Besides, analyzing this data and gaining insights out of them is a lot of work. Automated data mining techniques can be used, but they need to be accurate. Another challenge is highly involving users into the developing process. Once users can give their input, they start to have expectations. These expectation need to be lived up to, otherwise users will feel like their participation was pointless and they will get disappointed. As last, motivating the users to give feedback is a challenge. Each user needs a different approach to get motivated, because you want them to be genuinely interested in helping the products’ success. But motivating the users can quickly affect the feedbacks’ usefulness and truthfulness. Therefore it is not quite clear whether investing your time and money into crowd-based Requirements Engineering is worth it in the end. Feedback can also be collected through a simple feature that asks the users for a rating or comment on an application. But is that enough to get insights in customers’ needs?
References:
Eduard C Groen, et al. The crowd in requirements engineering: The landscape and challenges. IEEE software, 34(2):44–52, 2017.
