Smarter Software Release Planning A Case Study on Using Business Intelligence and Social Media Mining to Analyze Market Trends

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Tracking market trends is an important part of market-driven software release planning, although often challenging because of rapid changes in consumer demand. Recently, there has been a growing interest to utilize social media mining to track and analyze consumer opinions. A Business Intelligence tool for analyzing buzz on social media could potentially give valuable decision support for software release planning by providing up-to-date insights into market trends. METHOD: This paper presents a Business Intelligence tool which was developed using a design research approach. The application serves as a proof of concept for analyzing buzz on social media and was evaluated in the context of software release planning and market-driven planning separately through a case study. RESULTS: During evaluation it was found that buzz on social media was considered to be an interesting source of information, but that specific applications within software release planning were not obvious. An information quality assessment confirmed big challenges in interpretation of data from social media, which could partly be addressed with increased domain knowledge and search optimization. CONCLUSIONS: The case study confirms that a Business Intelligence tool for mining social media could serve as a complementary support for decisions regarding software release planning. Recommended future work includes testing the hypothesis in a pure market-driven software release planning context, as well as incorporating geographical attributes.