The document discusses crowd-centric requirements engineering (CCRE), which advocates for effective application of crowdsourcing throughout the requirements engineering process. CCRE aims to involve the crowd in requirements elicitation, negotiation, and prioritization, with open contribution, continuous involvement, and lifelong evolution. Challenges of CCRE include ensuring quality of information from the crowd and addressing issues of crowdsourcing and gamification, like overlooking minorities or unhealthy dependencies. Current progress includes developing a CCRE method and prototype based on literature and expert interviews.

1. Crowd-Centric Requirements
Engineering
Remco Snijders1, Fabiano Dalpiaz1, Mahmood Hosseini2, Alimohammad
Shahri2, Raian Ali2
1Utrecht University, The Netherlands
2Bournemouth University, UK

2. 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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3. RE and SE
Poor RE Poor SE
Software
Failure
• Standish CHAOS Report: user involvement seems
to be the most important success factor for IT
Projects1
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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4. 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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5. Potentials of Crowdsourcing
in 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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6. Potentials of Gamification
in 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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7. Crowd Centric
Requirements Engineering
• CCRE advocates effective application of
crowdsourcing throughout RE
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8. Crowd Centric
Requirements 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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9. Crowd Centric
Requirements 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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10. 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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11. 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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12. Current Progress
• 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
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13. 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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14. Thank You!
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