Capturing consumer preferences as requirements for software product lines

Delivering great consumer experiences in competitive market conditions requires software vendors to move away from traditional modes of thinking to an outside-in perspective, one that shifts their business to becoming consumer-centric. Requirements engineers operating in these conditions thus need new means to both capture real preferences of consumers and then relate them to requirements for software customized in different ways to fit anyone. Additionally, because system development models require inputs that are more concrete than abstract, the indistinct values of consumers need to be classified and formalized. To address this challenge, this study aims to establish a conceptual link between preferences of consumers and system requirements, using software product line (SPL) as a means for systematically accommodating the variations within the preferences. The novelty of this study is a conceptual model of consumer preference, which integrates generic value frameworks from both psychology and marketing, and a method for its transformation to requirements for SPL using a goal-oriented RE framework as the mediator. The presented artifacts are grounded in an empirical study related to the development of a system for online education.