Requirements decision-making as a process of Argumentation: A Google Maps Case Study with Goal Model

In social media platforms, crowd-users extensively interact and contribute information related to software applications. Usually, crowd-users discuss software features or hot issues and record their opinions about the software applications under discussion either in textual form or via end-user votes. Such requirements-related information is considered a pivotal alternative source for requirements engineers to the already existing in-house stakeholders in order to illustrate decision-making. Also, requirements decision-making for Crowd requirements engineering is a difficult task, as it is always based on incomplete knowledge and requires trade-offs from multi-perspectives. However, existing requirements models and associated tools are still lacking, which enable requirements engineers to make informed decision-making and capture conflicting requirements knowledge. This paper elaborates the interaction among the crowd-users about the Google Map mobile application in the Reddit forum to recover conflicting requirements-related information using the goal modeling approach. For this purpose, we extracted critical arguments from a crowd-users conversation in user forums regarding a given design; built a graphical argumentation model based on the extracted information; aligned types of arguments with goal-oriented modeling constructs in the non-functional requirements framework; conducted exiting goal-model analysis to the requirements model to reach consensus based on argumentation and reasoning, such as supporting, attacking, undefined, and conflicting. The proposal is described with illustrative example models and the associated evaluation processes of design decision-making situation for Google Map interface design.