Requirements Elicitation in Market-driven Software Development Companies: An Investigation of Crowd Involvement

Market-driven (MD) software products are increasingly prevalent, and companies involved in such development target an open marketplace with a large and diverse customer base. There are well-known inherent issues in the requirements elicitation of these kinds of products. To handle these issues, a suitable requirement elicitation technique is needed. One promising solution proposed by researchers is crowd-based requirements elicitation (CBRE). This study investigates how such organizations apply CBRE within their requirements engineering practices. Based on sixteen semi-structured interviews with practitioners from MD software product companies across various domains, this research identifies how CBRE complements traditional and agile approaches of requirements elicitation for the products in these companies.The findings show that CBRE is typically adopted as a hybrid and context-driven practice rather than a standalone approach. Three main forms of crowdsourcing: internal, active, and passive, were observed. The study also investigated CBRE benefits, barriers, and relevant mitigation strategies of these barriers. The barriers have been mapped to the elements of the socio-technical theory. Based on the results of this study, a Spiral model-inspired conceptual framework of crowd-based requirements elicitation for MD software development companies is proposed. The study contributes an empirically grounded understanding of CBRE in market-driven contexts and offers practical insights for its effective adoption in software product development.