Caveats in Eliciting Mobile App Requirements
This research addresses gaps in requirements elicitation for mobile app developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge without introducing new methods.
The study surveyed 45 companies and interviewed ten experts to investigate how factors like app stores and platform choices impact mobile app requirements, revealing a lack of knowledge among practitioners in areas such as data privacy leaks from third-party libraries and implementability issues due to library limitations.
Factors such as app stores or platform choices heavily affect functional and non-functional mobile app requirements. We surveyed 45 companies and interviewed ten experts to explore how factors that impact mobile app requirements are understood by requirements engineers in the mobile app industry. We observed a lack of knowledge in several areas. For instance, we observed that all practitioners were aware of data privacy concerns, however, they did not know that certain third-party libraries, usage aggregators, or advertising libraries also occasionally leak sensitive user data. Similarly, certain functional requirements may not be implementable in the absence of a third-party library that is either banned from an app store for policy violations or lacks features, for instance, missing desired features in ARKit library for iOS made practitioners turn to Android. We conclude that requirements engineers should have adequate technical experience with mobile app development as well as sufficient knowledge in areas such as privacy, security and law, in order to make informed decisions during requirements elicitation.