Leveraging User Feedback for Requirements Through Trend and Narrative Analysis

With the rapid rise of new mediums and surge of user discussion regarding software products, it is increasingly important to consider these user concerns to fulfill user needs, otherwise users may opt for alternatives. Traditional requirements elicitation approaches relied on interviews and surveys with stakeholders to elicit key and important requirements. Despite the advances from recent studies to leverage the “crowd” via increased involvement of crowd based discussions, we still lack empirical structured guidance and approaches to handle feedback from multiple sources and synthesize the themes that emerge from these sources. As providing feedback becomes more accessible for users, managing the volume of feedback is correspondingly challenging. Since development resources are often limited, organizations need to make trade-offs between different user concerns. Gaining more insights on the themes and the trends of these themes from feedback should help organizations conduct these requirement trade-offs. To better explain the emergent trends of user feedback, I use the concept of narratives from economics to explain the phenomenon of what and when users change in their user discussions. Narrative analysis can help explain the causes of feedback trends, which can support organizations determining the priority and validity of various themes from feedback. In this work, I describe my preliminary findings which indicate the profound role that trends and narratives in user feedback have on user perception and concerns. My work has shown that feedback sources, like social media, can provide an avenue to identify requirements. Finally, I outline my plan towards developing a framework to identify trends and narratives, and a tool to support automated identification of requirements in the form of user stories.