Crowd out the competition. Gaining market advantage through crowd-based requirements engineering

MyERP is a fictional developer of an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Driven by the competition, they face the challenge of losing market share if they fail to de-ploy a Software as a Service (SaaS) ERP system to the European market quickly, but with high quality product. This also means that the requirements engineering (RE) activities will have to be performed efficiently and provide solid results. An additional problem they face is that their (potential) stakeholders are physically distributed, it makes sense to consider them a "crowd". This competition paper suggests a Crowd-based RE approach that first identifies the crowd, then collects and analyzes their feedback to derive wishes and needs, and validate the results through prototyping. For this, techniques are introduced that have so far been rarely employed within RE, but more "traditional" RE techniques, will also be integrated and/or adapted to attain the best possible result in the case of MyERP.