Developing an Application for Dealing with Depression through the Analysis of Information and Requirements found in Groups from a Social Network

Software requirements engineering is the process of discovering, analyzing, documenting and verifying information systems' requirements and restrictions. Traditionally, requirements identification is performed with the presence of end-users. Nevertheless, in the context of mobile applications, there may be difficulty in contacting future end-users. Requirements elicitation techniques such as personas and empathy map can be applied in such context, allowing analysts to better understand end-users. However, such techniques are criticized due to the lack of scientific basis, difficulty in application, and risks in describing false users. In order to improve the reliability of those techniques, this paper proposes the use of social networks as a source of information to support these requirements elicitation techniques. We developed an application for fighting depression from requirements that were derived based on personas and empathy map together with the analysis of data from social networks. Our results show a positive end-user validation regarding the representation of a persona that suffers from depression based on social network data. Also, requirements elicitation can be applied for identifying end-users' needs when developing such software applications.