Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Extracting Business Value from Feature Requests Posted in User Forums

When making a decision to add features to an existing software product in response to feature requests posted in user forums, it is important to pursue only those changes that deliver value to both the user and the producer. But selecting critical user requirements expressed as features requests is a challenging task. While excluding a high value requirement may mean losing customers to a competing product, including a requirement that is unneeded increases time to market and introduces unnecessary costs and complexity in the product. Keeping these issues in focus, promising methods of feature selection were first identified from a review of requirements engineering, product development and quality literatures. An empirical study was then conducted to investigate the efficacy of methods in separating the vital few user feature requests from the trivial many posted in user forums without adversely impacting user satisfaction. The result of the empirical study demonstrates that the Kano survey method has potential in separating the wheat from the chaff. The reasons for this finding is empirically investigated and discussed.