Specifying requirements for collection and analysis of online user feedback

Abstract

According to data-driven Requirements Engineering (RE), explicit and implicit user feedback can be considered a relevant source of requirements, thus supporting requirements elicitation. However, limited attention has been paid so far to the role of online feedback in RE tasks, such as requirements validation, and on how to specify what online feedback to collect and analyse. We performed an action research study, together with a company that developed a platform for online training. This paper presents the design and execution of the study, and a discussion of its results. This study provides evidence about the need of practitioners to follow a simple but systematic approach for specifying requirements for data collection and analysis, at design time. Another outcome of this study is a method to tackle this task that leverages goal-oriented requirements modelling combined with Goal-Question-Metric. The applicability of the method has been explored on two industrial evaluations, while the perceived effectiveness, efficiency and acceptance have been assessed with practitioners through a dedicated survey.