Requirement validation method using social network service (SNS)

Abstract

Low quality requirements contribute to many problems throughout the software development life cycle. For this reason, requirements validation step, a last step of the requirements development, is a very important activity for finding potential problems of requirements and preventing failures. However, in practice, there are a lot of cases that omitted or simply processed. It causes scheduling delays and over-costs, and result in fail in software project. In the requirement validation step, the various aspects of the specific requirements are reviewed, and the one important factor is "Are the functions the user wants included in the specification?" at that time. This can be verified by the opinions of a lot of various users, and the appropriate method is the method to use social network services where users freely post and share their opinions. Interviews, questionnaires that are methods to identify user needs for a long time required a lot of time and costs, but, contrary to that, the identifying user needs through social network services have a characteristics that can identify the needs of a large number of different people at a relatively low cost and time. Therefore, this paper suggested a systematic method of requirements validation using social network services that can identify the needs of a large number of and various users with low cost and time relatively. It is available to check whether the functions desired by user are included in the software requirement specification correctly through this method and, also, prevent the problems caused by low quality requirement.