Crowd-Centric Requirements Engineering

Remco Snijders1, Fabiano Dalpiaz1, Mahmood Hosseini2, Alimohammad Shahri2, Raian Ali2

1Utrecht University, The Netherlands2Bournemouth University, UK

Overview

• The role of users in software success or failure

• The concept of user and user involvement

• Potentials of crowdsourcing in RE

• Potentials of gamification in RE

• Crowd Centric Requirements Engineering

• Challenges

• Current Progress

• Acknowledgment

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RE and SE

• Standish CHAOS Report: user involvement seems to be the most important success factor for IT Projects1

Poor RE Poor SESoftware

Failure

1 The Standish Group, “CHAOS Summary 2009,” Tech. Rep., 2009. [Online]. Available: http://emphasysbrokeroffice.com/files/2013/04/Standish-Group-CHAOS-Summary-2009.pdf

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User Concept and Involvement in Current Methods

• User concept is a narrow concept– Customers are given priority

– End users are marginalised

• User involvement is shallow– Only early phases of software development

– Only selected users have an input

– Input sometimes discarded by customers and developers through negotiation and prioritisation phases

• No incentives are usually provided– Voluntary basis

– Motivation might decrease gradually

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Potentials of Crowdsourcingin Requirements Engineering

• Crowdsourcing for user involvement:

– Scalable

• Should be aware of management and coordination issues when a large, diverse crowd is involved

– Inexpensive

• Should be aware of trustworthiness and incentives

– To be used in requirements elicitation, negotiation and prioritisation where users are 1st class

• Should be aware of quality assessment and control

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Potentials of Gamificationin Requirements Engineering

• Gamification for user involvement:

– More motivation

• Should be aware of trivialisation

– More sustainable

• Should be aware of on-going changes to keep users entertained

– Leading to more understanding of how users think

• Should be aware users attitude when overly/under motivated

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Crowd CentricRequirements Engineering

• CCRE advocates effective application of crowdsourcing throughout RE

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Crowd CentricRequirements Engineering

• Where the crowd participates:

– Requirements elicitation

– Requirements negotiation

– Requirements prioritisation

• How the crowd participates:

– Open contribution (not a selected few)

– Continuous involvement

– Lifelong evolution

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Crowd CentricRequirements Engineering

• How is the crowd rewarded:– Financial incentives– Social incentives– Entertainment incentives– Feedback – Changes in the software reflecting input

• Gamification could serve in the above:– Points can be earned for proposing, commenting on and

voting for requirements– Earned points can be used to promote own requirements

or for voting for other proposed requirements– Badges can be earned for constructive feedback

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Challenges

• Open management strategies should be encouraged– Openness to the crowd may raise users’

expectations that management cannot meet

• Quality of obtained information must be ensured– Not necessarily voluntary

– Users might be unaware of standards and guidelines of requirements documents and provide vague requirements

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Challenges

• Generic challenges of crowdsourcing and gamification must be addressed:– Overlooking minorities

– Malicious participants

– User dominance

– Unhealthy dependencies

– Task trivialisation

– Dishonesty to win rewards

– User clustering

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Current Progress

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• Interviews with experts from both industry and research

• CCRE method developed based on literature findings and expert advice

• A prototype that supports the 'crowd involvement' part of the method

• In the process of validating the method by conducting the preparatory phases & activities and testing the prototype

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

• The research was supported by an FP7 Marie Curie CIG grant (the SOCIAD Project) and by Bournemouth University through the Fusion Investment Fund (the BBB, BUUU and VolaComp projects) and the Graduate School Santander Grant for PGR Development.

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Thank You!

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