Factors such as app stores or platform choices heavily affect functional and
non-functional mobile app requirements. We surveyed 45 companies and
interviewed ten experts to explore how factors that impact mobile app
requirements are understood by requirements engineers in the mobile app
industry.
We observed a lack of knowledge in several areas. For instance, we observed
that all practitioners were aware of data privacy concerns, however, they did
not know that certain third-party libraries, usage aggregators, or advertising
libraries also occasionally leak sensitive user data. Similarly, certain
functional requirements may not be implementable in the absence of a
third-party library that is either banned from an app store for policy
violations or lacks features, for instance, missing desired features in ARKit
library for iOS made practitioners turn to Android.
We conclude that requirements engineers should have adequate technical
experience with mobile app development as well as sufficient knowledge in areas
such as privacy, security and law, in order to make informed decisions during
requirements elicitation.Comment: The 24th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in
Software Engineering (EASE 2020