An Engineering Methodology for Development of Consumer Oriented E-Software with Massive Number of Users

Traditional software engineering methodologies are based on acquiring precise and rigid requirements from individual users, and developing the software directly based on them. Internet based consumer-oriented software has millions of users. Gathering precise requirements from millions of users is a daunting and infeasible task; furthermore many requirements conflict with each other. We propose a new approach whereby, individual rigid requirements are acquired from representative users. These requirements are transformed into high-level requirements to explore design alternatives and to derive design specifications. The design specification provides a solid foundation for implementation and verification, while high-level requirement specification provides a solid foundation for validation