Question

What configurators use to capture customer preferences​

Answer 1

Answer:

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.

Explanation:

e provide an overview of the proposed method for utilizing the preferences of consumers to derive the requirements for a line of software products. The method consists of two steps in which different models are constructed (Fig. 1). The objective of the first step is to, by capturing the preferences of the users of a product, produce a consumer preference model that is used as the input to the second step that, using goal-oriented and feature modeling, derives system requirements for a SPL. The identified requirements reflect the different preferences of users of a software system, which by complementing core functional requirements, classify and prioritize additional system requirements as the variations and commonalities of a product line.