Towards crowdsourcing for requirements engineering

Crowdsourcing is an emerging, typically online, distributed problem solving and production model where a problem is solved through the involvement of a large number of people. In this study, we investigate the potential of crowdsourcing in aiding Requirements Engineering. Although the whole area is still to be explored fully, we focus on the Requirements Elicitation stage. In this paper, we survey the literature on crowdsourcing in a variety of disciplines and deduce a set of features which characterize its main constructs; the crowd and the crowdsourcers. We then conduct two focus groups to explore the relation-ship between these features and the quality of requirements elicited via crowdsourcing. The analysis will lead to a number of hypotheses to confirm and enhance in a future research in the area. The ultimate goal is to systematically develop crowdsourcing platforms for Requirements Engineering and guarantee correctness and maximize efficiency.