Assignment 1 - Methodology

Using Social Network Service to determine the Initial User

Requirements for HealthFit

Batch B2

Team Member 1:

S Vishnu Sai

201CS160

8520023237

vishnusai.201cs160@nitk.edu.in

Team Member 2:

Venum Dharani

201CS166

7780476434

dharanivenum.201cs166@nitk.edu.in

Proposed Work
This proposed system is an application that provides assistance to the users on the
maintenance of their health and fitness.
We look at a set of data pertaining to the goals and objectives of the software: how it will work
and what are the qualities of the properties it must have to provide the results needed. We
then work forward from these data to look at specific coding solutions that support these
results. Elements of requirements engineering include: Requirements solicitation, where a
software company gets the requirements from a client, Requirements analysis, Requirements
specification, Requirements verification, where engineers confirm that the requirements are
accurate, Requirements management, which matches processes to their requirements.
This work presented focuses on user-led RE for HealthFit software application. More
specifically, our aim is to improve support for requirements discovery for systems by identifying
individual end-user’s needs and contextual information relevant to the early design process. It
discusses a novel approach for requirements engineering which is tailored to the needs of
developing Software application. We present requirements elicitation allowing social software
users to document needs in the form of surveys.

Methodology
This proposed work follows elicitation methodology. Most requirements elicitation approaches
focus on gathering requirements fulfilling the needs of the majority of stakeholders. We
foresee, that requirements elicitation tools installed on mobile devices such as smartphones
suggest the potential to support end-users in capturing individual needs. Therefore, our
research objective is to develop a mobile tool for end-users allowing them to capture their
needs wherever and whenever they want.

In order to be successful and to cope with short time-to-market periods, the methods used
need to be fast, easy and inexpensive. However, most state-of-the-art RE approaches and tools
are built from an RE perspective and require end users to get familiar with a particular system
and procedure. We therefore envision that novel RE approaches will focus on the end user
perspective.
For this, we have investigated the potential of popular social network sites (SNS) for
requirements elicitation, prioritization and negotiation. Considering the number of registered
users and regional popularity, we selected four candidates for our studies: Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and Google+. From these, Facebook [12] was chosen as the support for this research.
Today, m any end users are familiar with social network sites in general and Facebook in
particular. By using a platform that is part of end users’ daily lives, we aim to overcome current
limitations of RE tools in terms of end user acceptance and involvement.
We’re using Survey/Questionnaire technique which is a requirement elicitation technique that
allow the analyst to obtain data from a huge sample all at once. Stakeholders are provided a
collection of questions to measure their thoughts through SNS(Facebook). Data is analyzed to
assess the area of interest of stakeholders after collecting the responses. The optimal approach
to this strategy is to make a simple Google Form as the requirement elicitation tool, give it to
the target people, and decide a due date whenever possible.

Benefits:
Easy to get data from a large audience.

Less time is required for the participants to respond.

We can get more accurate information as compared to interviews.
Drawbacks:
All the Stakeholders might not participate in the surveys.
Questions may not be clear to all the participants.

Open-ended questions require more analysis.

Follow up surveys might be required based on the responses provided by participants.

Conclusion
The research presented in this paper, propose an SNS-based RE approach that allows a small
software to gather the distributed users’ needs from SNS. This approach supports and allows
the end-users to participate actively in RE activities such as requirements elicitation,
negotiation, and prioritization. Applying SNS-based approach within SNS make a distinct side to
the RE process. We would like to emphasize that the presented RE approach do not necessarily
provide well-specified user requirements but rather it reveals end-user needs and supports
software companies to identify the initial user requirements within their domain without
having any learning overhead to end-users.