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

Evolutionary Approaches for Multi-Objective Next Release Problem

In software industry, a common problem that the companies face is to decide what requirements should be implemented in the next release of the software. This paper aims to address the multi-objective next release problem using search based methods such as multi-objective evolutionary algorithms for empirical studies. In order to achieve the above goal, a requirement-dependency-based multi-objective next release model (MONRP/RD) is formulated firstly. The two objectives we are interested in are customers' satisfaction and requirement cost. A popular multi-objective evolutionary approach (MOEA), NSGA-II, is applied to provide the feasible solutions that balance between the two objectives aimed. The scalability of the formulated MONRP/RD and the influence of the requirement dependencies are investigated through simulations as well. This paper proposes an improved version of the multi-objective invasive weed optimization and compares it with various state-of-the-art multi-objective approaches on both synthetic and real-world data sets to find the most suitable algorithm for the problem

Improving Requirements Tracing via Information Retrieval

Abstrac

Elicitation and management of user requirements in market-driven software development

Market-driven software development companies experience challenges in requirements management that many traditional requirements engineering methods and techniques do not acknowledge. Large markets, limited contact with end users, and strong competition forces the market-driven software development company to constantly invent new, selling requirements, frequently release new versions with an accompanying pressure of short time-to-market, and take both the technical and financial risks of development. This thesis presents empirical results from case studies in requirements elicitation and management at a software development company. The results include techniques to explore, understand, and handle bottlenecks in the requirements process where requirements continuously arrive at a high rate from many different stakeholders. Through simulation of the requirements process, potential bottlenecks are identified at an early stage, and fruitless improvement attempts may be avoided. Several techniques are evaluated and recommended to support the market-driven organisation in order to increase software quality and avoid process overload situations. It is shown that a quick and uncomplicated in-house usability evaluation technique, an improved heuristic evaluation, may be adequate to get closer to customer satisfaction. Since needs and opportunities differ between markets, a distributed prioritisation technique is suggested that will help the organisation to pick the most cost-beneficial and customer satisfying requirements for development. Finally, a technique based on automated natural language analysis is investigated with the aim to help resolve congestion in the requirements engineering process, yet retaining ideas that may bring a competitive advantage

A design theory for requirements mining systems

Software requirements are often communicated in unstructured text documents, which need to be analyzed in order to identify and classify individual needs. This process is referred to as requirements mining in the context of this thesis. It is known to be time-consuming and error-prone when performed manually by a requirements engineer. Thus, there is a demand to support requirements mining through information technology. However, little research has been conducted to conceptualize theoretically grounded requirements mining systems and abstract the necessary design knowledge in a theory. Furthermore, existing works scarcely investigate the effect of these artifacts on requirements engineers’ productivity. Consequently in this thesis, the following research question is addressed: How can a system be designed which aims at improving requirements mining productivity over manual discovery? Following a Design Science approach, a design theory is derived consisting of design requirements, design principles and design features. Design requirements are identified based on general knowledge and kernel theories. Subsequently they are related to design principles which are finally mapped to design features of an artifact. The artifact is conceptualized in two design cycles, each resulting in a distinct artifact version and its evaluation. In the first design cycle a simulation is conducted to investigate the interplay of the preliminary design principles. In the second design cycle, the effects of the final design principles on requirements mining productivity are measured in an experiment. The thesis contributes to the design theory body of knowledge by providing a design theory for requirements mining systems. The theory is a contribution to the information systems literature because requirements mining systems represent an important class of design situations that have not been adequately described yet by existing works. From a practical point of view, the study addresses the need of requirements engineers to support their work by information technology and provides vendors of requirements engineering software packages guidelines to improve their products