Strategies, Benefits and Challenges of App Store-inspired Requirements Elicitation

App store-inspired elicitation is the practice of exploring competitors' apps, to get inspiration for requirements. This activity is common among developers, but little insight is available on its practical use, advantages and possible issues. This paper aims to empirically analyse this technique in a realistic scenario, in which it is used to extend the requirements of a product that were initially captured by means of more traditional requirements elicitation interviews. Considering this scenario, we conduct an experimental simulation with 58 analysts and collect qualitative data. We perform thematic analysis of the data to identify strategies, benefits, and challenges of app store-inspired elicitation, as well as differences with respect to interviews in the considered elicitation setting. Our results show that: (1) specific guidelines and procedures are required to better conduct app store-inspired elicitation; (2) current search features made available by app stores are not suitable for this practice, and more tool support is required to help analysts in the retrieval and evaluation of competing products; (3) while interviews focus on the why dimension of requirements engineering (i.e., goals), app store-inspired elicitation focuses on how (i.e., solutions), offering indications for implementation and improved usability. Our study provides a framework for researchers to address existing challenges and suggests possible benefits to fostering app store-inspired elicitation among practitioners.