Chair of Computer Science 5 (Information Systems & Databases) - RWTH Aachen University. Aachen .... To lower entry barriers, Requirements Bazaar provides.
Requirements Bazaar: Social Requirements Engineering for Community-Driven Innovation Dominik Renzel, Malte Behrendt, Ralf Klamma, Matthias Jarke Chair of Computer Science 5 (Information Systems & Databases) - RWTH Aachen University Aachen, Germany {renzel,behrendt,klamma,jarke}@dbis.rwth-aachen.de
Abstract—The innovation potential of niche communities often remains inaccessible to service providers due to a lack of awareness and effective negotiation between these two groups. Requirements Bazaar, a browser-based social software for Social Requirements Engineering (SRE), aims at bringing together communities and service providers into such a negotiation process. Communities should be supported to express and trace their requirements and eventually receive a realization. Service providers should be supported in discovering relevant innovative requirements to maximize impact with a realization. In this paper we present Requirements Bazaar with focus on four aspects: requirements specification, a workflow for co-creation, workspace integration and personalizable requirements prioritization. Index Terms—Social Requirements Engineering; Community of Practice; requirements elicitation; requirements negotiation; requirements traceability; requirements prioritization
I. I NTRODUCTION Traditional Requirements Engineering (RE) techniques are currently challenged by the massive scale, openness, diversity and uncertainty experienced with the Web. Scaling RE to many different, potentially unknown stakeholders from multiple disciplines [1] and managing uncertainty in the communication of requirements and constraints [2], [3] are essential prerequisites and challenges at the same time. RE tools should help service providers to identify and harness the Long Tail [4] innovation potential borne within large numbers of specialized Communities of Practice (CoP) [5]. The goal is to make innovative and relevant CoP requirements easily expressible for community members and accessible to service providers, ideally leading to a realization beneficial for both. Addressing these challenges we present Requirements Bazaar, a browser-based social software platform for Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) [6]. Stakeholders from diverse CoPs are brought together with service providers into an open, traceable process of collaborative requirements elicitation, negotiation, prioritization and realization. The Bazaar aims at supporting all stakeholders in reaching their particular goals: CoPs in expressing their particular needs and negotiating realizations in an intuitive, communityaware manner; service providers in prioritizing requirements for maximized impact. Requirements Bazaar integrates with typical end-user and developer work spaces to lower entry barriers. A ready-to-use installation is available at requirementsbazaar.org. An evaluation guide is available at requirementsbazaar.org/BazaarEvaluationGuide.
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Fig. 1. Requirements Bazaar - example requirement page
II. R EQUIREMENTS BAZAAR D ESCRIPTION A. Requirements Specification In Requirements Bazaar, a requirements specification is an aggregate of basic metadata, an arbitrary number of artifacts (annotated images, user stories, etc.) and traceable means for social participation (vote, share, comment, follow, contribute artifact, commit to lead, commit to develop, test prototype/solution) being part of the Requirements Bazaar workflow (cf. Section II-B). All information on a particular requirement along with its community participants and role-dependent participation options are condensed on a requirement page (cf. Figure 1). B. Co-Creation Workflow The co-creation workflow of Requirements Bazaar aims to continuously integrate communities into the entire service development process. Figure 2 depicts the 4-phase workflow. Requirements Bazaar allows phase-dependent co-creation operations: reporting new requirements, refining by adding artifacts or contributing to discussion, negotiating by voting or commenting, providing/testing a prototype/solution and acknowledging a solution. In the initial Idea Generation (1) phase a stakeholder reports an unfulfilled need in the form of an open requirement with initial metadata and artifacts. In
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RE 2013, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil Posters and Demos
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Fig. 2. Requirements Bazaar - basic workflow Fig. 3. Requirements Bazaar - requirements discovery page
the Idea Selection (2) phase refinement and negotiation among stakeholders takes place, until one service provider commits to take the lead for realization. The requirement is then assigned, thus transitioning to the Idea Realization (3) phase. Refinement and negotiation continue. The leader invites collaborators and links testable prototypes. Once realized and sufficiently negotiated and tested, the requirement enters the Idea Release (4) phase, where a final solution is acknowledged, possibly leading to new requirements. C. Workspace Integration To lower entry barriers, Requirements Bazaar provides different means to integrate with end-user and developer workspaces. Ready-to-use dialogs for reporting applicationspecific requirements can be easily integrated into arbitrary Web applications by instrumentation with a small Web plugin. Furthermore, stakeholders can monitor requirements by subscribing to event notifications. For assigned requirements, Requirements Bazaar supports bi-directional integration with issue trackers in terms of synchronization, thus providing traceability beyond its borders. We demonstrate such integration with an Atlassian JIRA issue tracker. D. Personalizable Requirements Prioritization Requirements Bazaar supports requirements prioritization with a modular extensible requirements ranking framework. A linear weighted combination of multiple scoring providers serves as foundation for computing one singular normalized requirement relevance ranking score. A requirements discovery page (cf. Figure 3) serves requirements ranking lists along with a break-down of influences from individual scoring providers. Scoring factors are assigned to the categories user rating (e.g. up/downvoting), user behavior (e.g. monitored activity in Requirements Bazaar, external service usage) and community belonging (e.g. relation to stakeholders with similar interests). Category weights are configurable with respect to personal preferences of scoring factor importance. Reasonable initial default weight configurations are given (user rating only, equal weight distribution over all categories). III. C ONCLUSION & F UTURE W ORK In this paper we described Requirements Bazaar, a Webbased social software tool for Social Requirements Engineer-
ing (SRE). The current version resulted from an iterative development process, followed by initial exploratory evaluation studies. For the future, we envision generic applicability to multiple domains and classes of services. Requirements Bazaar will be subject to further development, refinement and evaluation, in particular focusing on researching and tuning further ranking factors and their weights for requirements prioritization. Requirements Bazaar is currently in evaluative use in the large-scale EU ICT integrating project Learning Layers. In particular it supports RE-related tasks in mobile application development for small and medium-size enterprises in the health care and construction work sectors across Europe. User-contributed experience reports and suggestions for Requirements Bazaar already now help us to continuously improve the system and its benefits for further communities. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The research leading to these results received funding from the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements 231396 (Responsive Open Learning Environments) and 318209 (Learning Layers). R EFERENCES [1] B. H. C. Cheng and J. M. Atlee, “Research Directions in Requirements Engineering,” in 2007 Future of Software Engineering, ser. FOSE ’07. Washington, DC, USA: IEEE Computer Society, 2007, pp. 285–303. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/FOSE.2007.17 [2] L. Liu, E. Yu, and H. Mei, “Guest Editorial: Special Section on Requirements Engineering for Services: Challenges and Practices,” IEEE Transactions of Service Computing, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 318–319, 2009. [3] M. F. Costabile, P. Mussio, L. Parasiliti Provenza, and A. Piccinno, “End users as unwitting software developers,” in Proceedings of the 4th international workshop on End-user software engineering, ser. WEUSE ’08. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2008, pp. 6–10. [Online]. Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1370847.1370849 [4] C. Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion, 2006. [5] E. Wenger, Community of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. [6] E. Lai-Chong Law, A. Chatterjee, D. Renzel, and R. Klamma, “The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) Approach to Developing a Large-Scale Personal Learning Environment Infrastructure,” in EC-TEL, ser. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, A. Ravenscroft, S. N. Lindstaedt, C. Delgado Kloos, and D. Hern´andez Leo, Eds., vol. 7563. Springer, 2012, pp. 194– 207.
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