Toward Automating Crowd RE

Crowd RE is an emerging avenue for engaging the general public or the so called crowd in variety of requirements engineering tasks. Crowd RE scales RE by involving, potentially, millions of users. Although humans are at the center of Crowd RE, automated techniques are necessary (1) to derive useful insights from large amounts of raw data the crowd can produce; and (2) to drive the Crowd RE process, itself, by facilitating novel workflows combining crowd and machine intelligence.To facilitate automated techniques for Crowd RE, first, we showcase a crowd-acquired dataset, consisting of requirements and their ratings on multiple dimensions for the smart homes application domain. Our dataset is unique in that it contains not only requirements, but also the characteristics of the crowd workers who produced those requirements including their demographics, personality traits, and creative potential. Understanding the crowd characteristics is essential to developing effective Crowd RE processes. Second, we outline key challenges involved in automating Crowd RE and describe, how our dataset can serve as a foundation for developing such automated techniques.