Requirements cybernetics: Elicitation based on user behavioral data

- Users' behavioral data provides important cue for product improvement.
- Requirements elicitation process is formulated as a feedback control system.
- This is an attempt to seek synergies between requirements and cybernetics.
- Potential control variables of data-driven elicitation are discussed.

Users' behavioral data provides important cue for product improvement. Today's web based applications collect various kinds of service data, which is an ideal source of information for product designers to better understand users' needs and behaviors. This paper first discusses the types of data collected so far, and then such data-driven requirements elicitation process is formulated as a feedback control system, where the classical requirements elicitation philosophy turns into a continuous optimization to user behavioral models. To this end, it is important to know how the data collection function reflects user behavior, and how specific data analysis approaches help making design decisions. This is an attempt to seek practical synergies between the two disciplines of requirements and cybernetics, to explore the possibilities of formulating problems in requirements with concepts and frameworks from cybernetics, and understand to what extent that known research results from cybernetics can be applied to address requirements problems. In particular, control frameworks for the user data driven requirements elicitation process are experimented, and potential control variables are discussed. We use two example cases to illustrate the proposed approach, an online dictionary service and a mobile music player service.