How Do Requirements Evolve During Elicitation? An Empirical Study Combining Interviews and App Store Analysis
Alessio Ferrari, Paola Spoletini, Sourav Debnath

TL;DR
This empirical study investigates how requirements evolve during elicitation, revealing that requirements are co-created through interviews and app store analysis, with significant extensions inspired by similar products.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence on the evolution of requirements, highlighting the role of analysts and app store analysis in enriching initial requirements.
Findings
Only 30-38% of requirements are fully traced to initial ideas.
Up to 42% of requirements are inspired by app store features.
Requirements evolve through co-creation and external inspiration.
Abstract
Requirements are elicited from the customer and other stakeholders through an iterative process of interviews, prototyping, and other interactive sessions. Then, requirements can be further extended, based on the analysis of the features of competing products available on the market. Understanding how this process takes place can help to identify the contribution of the different elicitation phases, thereby allowing requirements analysts to better distribute their resources. In this work, we empirically study in which way requirements get transformed from initial ideas into documented needs, and then evolve based on the inspiration coming from similar products. To this end, we select 30 subjects that act as requirements analysts, and we perform interview-based elicitation sessions with a fictional customer. After the sessions, the analysts produce a first set of requirements for the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSoftware Engineering Techniques and Practices · Software Engineering Research · Advanced Software Engineering Methodologies
