Crowdsourced Requirements Engineering Challenges and Solutions: A Software Industry Perspective

Software crowdsourcing (SW CS) is an evolving software development paradigm, in which crowds of people are asked to solve various problems through an open call (with the encouragement of prizes for the top solutions). Because of its dynamic nature, SW CS has been progressively accepted and adopted in the software industry. However, issues pertinent to the understanding of requirements among crowds of people and requirements engineers are yet to be clarified and explained. If the requirements are not clear to the development team, it has a significant effect on the quality of the software product. This study aims to identify the potential challenges faced by requirements engineers when conducting the SW-CS based requirements engineering (RE) process. Moreover, solutions to overcome these challenges are also identified. Qualitative data analysis is performed on the interview data collected from software industry professionals. Consequently, 20 SW-CS based RE challenges and their subsequent proposed solutions are devised, which are further grouped under seven categories. This study is beneficial for academicians, researchers and practitioners by providing detailed SW-CS based RE challenges and subsequent solutions that could eventually guide them to understand and effectively implement RE in SW CS.