Data-Driven Requirements Prioritization Framework for App Reviews

Abstract

The rapid expansion of market-driven software product development has led to the increasing use of User-Generated Content (UGC), such as mobile application user reviews, as a valuable source of requirements. However, unlike the traditional requirements engineering (RE) process, data-driven RE introduces several challenges, particularly in requirements elicitation and prioritization. Traditional requirements prioritization techniques typically rely on stakeholders’ involvement; however, in data-driven and market-driven development contexts, explicit stakeholders are often absent. Thus, we propose a DAta-driven Requirements Prioritization (DARP) framework that integrates Natural Language Processing (NLP), topic modeling, and Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate requirements prioritization in a data-driven development context. The proposed framework utilizes BERTopic to identify latent topics in user reviews and incorporates Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) to group semantically related requirements. The proposed framework introduces a robust and automated prioritization applied to mobile app reviews. The scope of the proposed framework is user-perspective prioritization. Our objective is to detect insights from app reviews to reflect the voice of the customer. The results indicate that leveraging NLP and topic modeling techniques provides an effective data-driven approach to requirements prioritization.