The Crowd in Requirements Engineering: The Landscape and Challenges

• Published in: IEEE software Vol. 34; no. 2; pp. 44 - 52
• Main Authors: Groen, Eduard C., Seyff, Norbert, Ali, Raian, Dalpiaz, Fabiano, Doerr, Joerg, Guzman, Emitza, Hosseini, Mahmood, Marco, Jordi, Oriol, Marc, Perini, Anna, Stade, Melanie
• Format: Journal Article Publication
• Language: English
• Published: Los Alamitos IEEE 01.03.2017; IEEE Computer Society
• Subjects: Context awareness; Context modeling; Continuous flow; crowd-based requirements engineering; CrowdRE; Crowdsourcing; Enginyeria de programari; Enginyeria del software; Informàtica; Monitoring; Object-oriented programming (Computer science); Programació orientada a l'objecte (Informàtica); Requirements analysis; requirements engineering; Software; Software development; Software engineering; software requirements; Stakeholders; user feedback; Àrees temàtiques de la UPC
• DOI: 10.1109/MS.2017.33
• ISSN: 0740-7459

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.