Learn More, Pay Less! Lessons Learned from Applying the Wizard-of-Oz Technique for Exploring Mobile App Requirements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mobile apps have exploded in popularity, encouraging developers to provide content to the massive user base of the main app stores. Although there exist automated techniques that can classify user comments into various topics with high levels of precision, recent studies have shown that the top apps in the app stores do not have customer ratings that directly correlate with the app's success. This implies that no single requirements elicitation technique can cover the full depth required to produce a successful product and that applying alternative requirements gathering techniques can lead to success when these two are combined. Since user involvement has been found to be the most impactful contribution to project success, in this paper we will explore how the Wizard-of-Oz (WOz) technique and user reviews available in Google Play, can be integrated to produce a product that meets the demand of more stakeholders than either method alone. To compare the role of early interactive requirements specification and app reviews, we conducted two studies: (i) a case study analysis on 13 mobile app development teams who used very early stages Requirements Engineering (RE) by applying WOz, and (ii) a study analyzing 40 (70, 592 reviews) similar mobile apps on Google Play. The results of both studies show that while each of WOz and app review analysis techniques can be applied to capture specific types of requirements, an integrated process including both methods would eliminate the communication gap between users and developers at early stages of the development process and mitigates the risk of requirements change in later stages.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.026 | 0.069 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".