Strategies, Benefits and Challenges App Store-inspired Requirements Elicitation - Supplementary Material

This is the supplementary material for the paper "Strategies, Benefits and Challenges App Store-inspired Requirements Elicitation". 

Abstract: App store-inspired elicitation is the practice of exploring competitors’ apps, to get inspiration for requirements. This activity is common among developers, but little insight is available on its practical use, advantages and possible issues. This paper aims to study strategies, benefits and challenges of app store-inspired elicitation, and compare this technique with more traditional requirements elicitation interviews. We conduct an experimental simulation with 58 analysts, and collect qualitative data. Our results show that specific guidelines and procedures are required to better conduct app store-inspired elicitation. Furthermore, current search features made available by app stores are not suitable for this practice, and more tool support is required to help analysts in the retrieval and
evaluation of competing products. While interviews focus on the why dimension of requirements engineering (i.e., goals), app store-inspired elicitation focuses on how (i.e., solutions), offering indications for implementation and improved usability. Our study provides a framework for researchers to address existing challenges, and suggests possible benefits to foster app store-inspired elicitation among practitioners.

The package contains the following files:

1.Protocol.pdf - it describes in details the steps of the protocol and the intermediate results obtained during the execution.

2. Codebooks:
2.a. Codebook Strategies: codebook of the strategies to select apps
2.b Codebook Benefits: codebook of the benefits of use IBE (sheet 1) and ASE (sheet 2)
2.c Codebook Challenges: codebook of the challenged of use IBE (sheet 1) and ASE (sheet 2)
2.d Differences IBE-ASE: table of the identified (categorized) differences between IBE and ASE

3. Labelled Data 
3.a Strategies - labelled data: the file contains the name of the selected apps, the motivation behind the selection, and the themes assigned to them (refer to 2.a for explanation of the themes).
3.b Benefits IBE - labelled data: the file contains the extract of the raw data about IBE benefits and the  themes assigned (refer to 2.b for explanation of the themes).
3.c Challenges IBE - labelled data: the file contains the extract of the raw data about IBE challenges and the themes assigned (refer to 2.c for explanation of the themes).
3.d Benefits ASE - labelled data: the file contains the extract of the raw data about ASE benefits and the themes assigned (refer to 2.b for explanation of the themes).
3.e Challenges ASE - labelled data: the file contains the extract of the raw data about IBE benefits and the themes assigned (refer to 2.c for explanation of the themes).

4. Raw data.xls: it contains the raw data used in the work (two sheets, one for strategies and one for reflections).

5. SLR data: data related to the lightweight systematic literature review 
5.a Codebook Scopus.xlsx: codebook for the themes elicited from the SLR. The themes are also present in the files in the folder Codebooks.
5.b SLR-scopus-results-and-selected.xlsx: results of the search string, and, in green, the selected papers. 

6. Readme.txt: summary file. 

Note that some of the row in Raw data.xls (and in the corresponding "Labelled Data" files)  are substituted with N/A. This corresponds to those participants who asked to not publicly share their responses.