Analysing User Feedback and Finding Experts: Can Goal-Orientation Help?

Goal-oriented approaches in requirements engineering aim at understanding stakeholders’ needs, modelling the intentions, dependencies and expectation to be met by a system-to-be, or by a new release of an existing system in a software evolution process. In the context of software evolution, we consider user feedback, as commonly available in user forums and bug-trackers, as the information artefact that impacts specific requirements and design of the software. In this position paper, we argue about the advantages that goal-orientation can bring in this context when addressing the following issues: i) the analysis of user feedback, usually expressed as free or semi-structured text; and ii) the identification of the most expert users that can contribute to requirements evolution. We define the problems, state the emerging research questions and present contributions with the help of an illustrative example.