Exploring the Critical Benefits and Challenges of Social Network Site-Based Requirement Elicitation in Saudi Arabia

The digital transformation and proliferation of social network sites (SNSs) have created new opportunities to consider digital sources to support the development of software systems. Social network sites (SNSs), such as Twitter and Facebook, can be major sources used during the process of requirement elicitation to identify and extract users’ requirements. The primary objective of SNS-based requirement elicitation is to overcome the limitations of the traditional requirement elicitation methods. However, these valued resources for requirement elicitation are yet to be fully exploited. Software products might not fulfill users’ needs owing to the numerous challenges in processing the data effectively. This study aims to explore the actual use, benefits, and challenges of SNS-based requirement elicitation. Twenty-five practitioners in the software companies in Saudi Arabia were interviewed, and thematic analysis was conducted on the interview data. With the application of the TOE model, five critical benefits and nine challenges were identified and classified into technological, organizational, and environmental contexts. The findings of this study offer valuable implications for researchers and practitioners by providing fine-grained details about the adoption of SNS-based requirement elicitation that could eventually facilitate its implementation effectively.