Learn More, Pay Less! Lessons Learned from Applying the Wizard-of-Oz Technique for Exploring Mobile App Requirements

摘要

Mobile apps have exploded in popularity, encouraging developers to providecontent to the massive user base of the main app stores. Although there existautomated techniques that can classify user comments into various topics withhigh levels of precision, recent studies have shown that the top apps in theapp stores do not have customer ratings that directly correlate with the app'ssuccess. This implies that no single requirements elicitation technique cancover the full depth required to produce a successful product and that applyingalternative requirements gathering techniques can lead to success when thesetwo are combined. Since user involvement has been found to be the mostimpactful contribution to project success, in this paper we will explore howthe Wizard of Oz (WOz) technique and user reviews available in Google Play, canbe integrated to produce a product that meets the demand of more stakeholdersthan either method alone. To compare the role of early interactive requirementsspecification and app reviews, we conducted two studies (i) a case studyanalysis on 13 mobile app development teams who used very early stagesRequirements Engineering (RE) by applying WOz, and (ii) a study analyzing 40(70, 592 reviews) similar mobile apps on Google Play. The results of bothstudies show that while each of WOz and app review analysis techniques can beapplied to capture specific types of requirements, an integrated processincluding both methods would eliminate the communication gap between users anddevelopers at early stages of the development process and mitigates the risk ofrequirements change in later stages.