StakeCloud Tool: From cloud consumers' search queries to new service requirements

Abstract

Requirements elicitation is indispensable for delivering successful services. Nevertheless, cloud service providers mostly rely on ad-hoc approaches, as there are no dedicated elicitation methods for cloud services. To address this problem, we developed the StakeCloud approach, which helps cloud providers elicit requirements for future cloud services. StakeCloud builds and analyzes fuzzy Galois lattices based on consumers' advanced search queries for cloud services. Our StakeCloud Tool automatically builds the lattice from the given search queries. It provides the requirements analyst with extensive clustering and analysis capabilities as well as means for comparing different newly generated classes of services. These allow identifying the threshold for achieving the largest populations of satisfied consumers with a minimum set of features implemented. Further, our tool enables eliciting real requirements from global consumers unobtrusively.