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

A goal model for crowdsourced software engineering

Crowdsourced Software Engineering (CSE) is the act of undertaking any external software engineering tasks by an undefined, potentially large group of online workers in an open call format. Using an open call, CSE recruits global online labor to work on various types of software engineering tasks, such as requirements extraction, design, coding and testing. The field is rising rapidly and touches various aspects of software engineering. CSE has grown significance in both academy and industry. Despite of the enormous usage and significance of CSE, there are many open challenges reported by various researchers. In order to overcome the challenges and realizing the full potential of CSE, it is highly important to understand the concrete advantages and goals of CSE. In this paper, we present a goal model for CSE, to understand the real environment of CSE, and to explore the aspects that can somehow overcome the aforementioned challenges. The model is designed using RiSD, a method for building Strategic Dependency (SD) models in the i* notation, applied in this work using iStar2.0. This work can be considered useful for CSE stakeholders (Requesters, Workers, Platform owners and CSE organizations).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

The use of iStar in situational method engineering: an ongoing study

Context: Situational Method Engineering (SME) is the discipline that aims at the systematic definition of methods adapted to specific contexts of use (situations). The use of goal-oriented methods for supporting SME is an active research line where the iStar 2.0 language is applied. Objective: We plan to conduct an experiment to investigate some designated pragmatic qualities, namely the perceived usefulness, ease of use and accuracy of iStar 2.0 when used in the SME context. Method:This paper presents our current work on designing an empirical study for the use of iStar 2.0 in SME. Next steps: We plan to refine our current study and run pilots until our measurement tools and sample population are ready for experimental execution.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Given Enough Eyeballs, all Bugs are Shallow - A Literature Review for the Use of Crowdsourcing in Software Testing

Over the last years, the use of crowdsourcing has gained a lot of attention in the domain of software engineering. One key aspect of software development is the testing of software. Literature suggests that crowdsourced software testing (CST) is a reliable and feasible tool for manifold kinds of testing. Research in CST made great strides; however, it is mostly unstructured and not linked to traditional software testing practice and terminology. By conducting a literature review of traditional and crowdsourced software testing literature, this paper delivers two major contributions. First, it synthesizes the fields of crowdsourcing research and traditional software testing. Second, the paper gives a comprehensive overview over findings in CST-research and provides a classification into different software testing types

The use of iStar in Situational Method Engineering : an ongoing study

Context. Situational Method Engineering (SME) is the discipline that aims at the systematic definition of methods adapted to specific contexts of use (situations). The use of goal-oriented methods for supporting SME is an active research line where the iStar 2.0 language is applied. Objective. We plan to conduct an experiment to investigate some designated pragmatic qualities, namely the perceived usefulness, ease of use and accuracy of iStar 2.0 when used in the SME context. Method. This paper presents our current work on designing an empirical study for the use of iStar 2.0 in SME. Next steps. We plan to refine our current study and run pilots until our measurement tools and sample population are ready for experimental execution

Open BOK on Software Engineering Educational Context: A Systematic Literature Review

In this review, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on Open Body of Knowledge (BOK) is presented. Moreover, the theoretical base to build a model for knowledge description was created, and it was found that there is a lack of guidelines to describe knowledge description because of the dramatically increasing number of requirements to produce an Open BOK, the difficulty of comparing related BOK contents, and the fact that reusing knowledge description is a very laborious task. In this sense, this review can be considered as a first step in building a model that can be used for describing knowledge description in Open BOK. Finally, in order to improve the educational context, a comparison among BOK, structure, and evolution is conducted.This work is supported partially by RTI2018-096846-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) and ADIAN grant IT980-16 (BasqueGovernment)

Application of Crowdsourcing in User Experience collection – a case study of Malayalam mobile applications

Purpose – This paper aims to prove the following hypothesis Problem Statement: HYPOTHESIS (1) User Experience collection of mobile applications can be done using the Crowdsourcing mechanism; (2) User Experience collection of mobile applications are influenced by the mindset of Crowdmembers, culture/ethnicity/social background, ease of interface use and rewards, among other factors. Design/methodology/approach – The authors of this paper, did a literature review first to find if Crowdsourcing was applicable and a used method to solve problems in Software Engineering. This helped us to narrow down the application of Crowdsourcing to the Requirements Engineering-Usability (User Experience) collection. User experience collection of two Malayalam language-based mobile applications, AarogyaSetu and BevQ was done as the next step. Incorporating findings from Study I, another study using AarogyaSetu and Manglish was launched as Study II. The results from both cases were consolidated and analyzed. Significant concerns relating to expectations of Crowd members with User Experience collection were unraveled and the purpose of Study was accomplished. Findings – (1) Crowdsourcing is and can be used in Software Engineering activities. (2) Crowd members have expectations (motivating factors) of User Interface and other elements that enable them to be an effective contributor. (3) An individual’s environment and mindset (character) are influential in him becoming a contributor in Crowdsourcing. (4) Culture and social practices of a region strongly affects the crowd-participating decision of an individual. Originality/value – This is purely self-done work. The value of this research work is two-fold. Crowdsourcing is endorsed significant in Software Engineering tasks, especially in User Experience collection of mobile applications. Two, the Crowd service requesters can be careful about designing the questionnaire for Crowdsourcing. They have to be aware and prepared to meet the expectations of the Crowd. This can ensure the active participation of potential contributors. Future researchers can use the results of this work to base their research on similar purposes

A survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering

The term 'crowdsourcing' was initially introduced in 2006 to describe an emerging distributed problem-solving model by online workers. Since then it has been widely studied and practiced to support software engineering. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of the use of crowdsourcing in software engineering, seeking to cover all literature on this topic. We first review the definitions of crowdsourcing and derive our definition of Crowdsourcing Software Engineering together with its taxonomy. Then we summarise industrial crowdsourcing practice in software engineering and corresponding case studies. We further analyse the software engineering domains, tasks and applications for crowdsourcing and the platforms and stakeholders involved in realising Crowdsourced Software Engineering solutions. We conclude by exposing trends, open issues and opportunities for future research on Crowdsourced Software Engineering

Mobile devices compatibility testing strategy via crowdsourcing

Purpose - This paper aims to support small mobile application development teams or companies performing testing on a large variety of operating systems versions and mobile devices to ensure their seamless working. Design/methodology/approach - This paper proposes a “hybrid crowdsourcing” method that leverages the power of public crowd testers. This leads to generating a novel crowdtesting workflow Developer/Tester- Crowdtesting (DT-CT) that focuses on developers and crowd testers as key elements in the testing process without the need for intermediate as managers or leaders. This workflow has been used in a novel crowdtesting platform (AskCrowd2Test). This platform enables testing the compatibility of mobile devices and applications at two different levels, high-level (device characteristics) or low-level (code). Additionally, a “crowd-powered knowledge base” has been developed that stores testing results, relevant issues and their solutions. Findings - The comparison of the presented DT-CT workflow with the common and most recent crowdtesting workflows showed that DT-CT may positively impact the testing process by reducing time-consuming and budget spend because of the direct interaction of developers and crowd testers. Originality/value - To authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to propose crowdtesting workflow based on developers and public crowd testers without crowd managers or leaders, which light the beacon for the future research in this field. Additionally, this work is the first that authorizes crowd testers with a limited level of experience to participate in the testing process, which helps in studying the behaviors and interaction of end-users with apps and obtains more concrete results