From Posts to Reqs and Back: Investigating Instagram's Potential in Supporting Requirements Engineers. An Empirical Study

Feedback about software products is valuable for assuring software quality and identifying ideas for improvement. Frequently, it is gathered from social media platforms or stores with applications and is in textual format. However, there are some social media platforms that contain information in which textual content is combined with pictures or videos. It has not yet been investigated whether feedback expressed in such a way can be useful for requirements engineers. To address this gap, we designed and conducted an empirical study analyzing 576 Instagram posts with pictures concerning 28 different software products. Then, we asked 5 practitioners about the usefulness of the posts. Remarkably, 51% of analyzed posts contained related information. Their textual content conveyed insights about building a community around the product or related to the product-related aspects, its benefits, features, and content, while images complemented the message by providing visual information about UI, user characteristics, content, and context characteristics. Practitioners suggested RE tasks in which such information would be useful. Our study shows that Instagram contains valuable information that might help formulate or improve software requirements. However, there are also several challenges, mainly how to analyze the posts, that open further research directions.