Bridging the vendor-user gap in enterprise cloud software development through data-driven requirements engineering
Philipp Hoffmann, Deborah Mateja, Kai Spohrer, Armin Heinzl · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2019
The shift from on-premise to cloud software has fundamentally changed the interactions between enterprise software vendors and their users. Where user involvement has traditionally been a challenge, increasingly large amounts of user input now allow for data-driven requirements engineering (RE). Research has paid little attention so far to the changes entailed by data-driven RE and addressed neither technical nor empirical perspectives of data-driven RE in enterprise software development. We aim to understand how the increasing availability of large amounts of user input impact RE in enterprise cloud software development. We provide a conceptualization of the newly available user input and how it changes traditional RE. We collect and analyze rich data from multiple product units at a leading enterprise software company and examine the integration of user input into RE; specifically requirements discovery, prioritization, experimentation, and specification. We thereby aim to contribute to non-normative and empirical work on RE.