Quest for Requirements: Scrutinizing Advanced Search Queries for Cloud Services with Fuzzy Galois Lattices

In software and requirements engineering, requirements elicitation is considered an essential step towards building successful systems. Despite extensive existing research in the field of distributed requirements engineering, the topic of requirements elicitation for cloud systems remains still uncovered. Cloud challenges (e.g., heterogeneous and globally distributed users, volatile requirements, frequent change requests) cannot always be satisfied by existing methods. We present a new approach for eliciting requirements for cloud services by analyzing advanced search queries. Our approach builds fuzzy Galois lattices for the terms that compose advanced search queries, thus enabling a thorough analysis of stored search data. This can support cloud providers in observing requirements clusters and new classes of cloud services, identifying the threshold for achieving satisfied consumers with a minimal set of requirements implemented, and thus designing novel solutions, based on market trends. Moreover, the Galois lattices approach enables large-scale consumers´ involvement and ensures the elicitation of real requirements unobtrusively.