How Requirements Engineering can benefit from crowds

Requirements are usually elicited, analyzed, and validated using techniques that are strongly based on the co-presence of the persons involved. These techniques can quickly become too costly and labor-intensive when used with larger populations. However, automation now enables us to acquire and interpret data from very large and heterogeneous groups of stakeholders, so-called "crowds". The combined set of techniques for analyzing data from the crowd using text- and usage mining, motivational techniques for stimulating further generation of data, and crowdsourcing to validate requirements, is coined "Crowd-based Requirements Engineering" (CrowdRE). Three scenarios show how the crowd's knowledge is a great source for helping to define requirements.