Customer requirements elicitation based on social network service

Abstract

In the early stages of a software project, it is critical to understand the needs of the customers and elicit their customer requirements. Various requirements elicitation methods have been proposed. However, existing methods still have the limitations such as a limited number of target customers, limited expression of customers' opinions, and difficulty in collecting the customers' opinions continuously. A novel method for eliciting customer requirements is proposed by utilizing a social network service (SNS), which is a shared source of raw information of the customers' needs and opinions. The proposed method is validated to show its effectiveness in overcoming the limitations of existing methods. © 2011 KSII.