A requirement engineering framework for s-commerce platforms

In this project, we focus on the requirement engineering for the specifics of s-commerce, in order to provide a framework that shapes such requirements in terms of contextualization, elicitation, documentation, validation and negotiation, management, and tooling. Indeed, requirements engineering would delineate the scope of a project and establish the common basis for communication for all disciplines involved in any s-commerce project. Requirements engineering directly influences the project quality and costs. The better the requirements engineering, the less expensive the errors that occur during development, thus decreasing overall costs? (International Requirement Engineering Board: www.ireb.org). Typically, there are three kinds of requirements: functional requirements, quality requirements, and constraints. Functional requirements concern with the core functionalities s-commerce platform provides to its users (individuals and communities). Quality requirements concern with aspects such as privacy, security, reliability, usability, performance, maintainability, and portability. The constraints concern with the scope of the platform. For s-commerce, the generic requirements focus on the interactions that related to the products/services and also processes. That is, the different types of participants interact to improve the products, services, or the processes with a certain level of control (e.g., a degree of freedom that has to be defined by the owner of the product, service, or process). These generic requirements concern with both the front-end and the back-end. That is, (1) what kind of interface the s-commerce platform should present to the participants in order to allow them to interact (participants? perspective) and (2) what kind of inherent computation behind the scene (business owner perspective) the s-commerce system should do, in terms of sensoring products/services/processes, data analysis, machine learning, recommendation algorithms, information retrieval, data mining, etc.

In this project, we focus on the requirement engineering for the specifics of s-commerce, in order to provide a framework that shapes such requirements in terms of contextualization, elicitation, documentation, validation and negotiation, management, and tooling. Indeed, requirements engineering would delineate the scope of a project and establish the common basis for communication for all disciplines involved in any s-commerce project. Requirements engineering directly influences the project quality and costs. The better the requirements engineering, the less expensive the errors that occur during development, thus decreasing overall costs? (International Requirement Engineering Board: www.ireb.org). Typically, there are three kinds of requirements: functional requirements, quality requirements, and constraints. Functional requirements concern with the core functionalities s-commerce platform provides to its users (individuals and communities). Quality requirements concern with aspects such as privacy, security, reliability, usability, performance, maintainability, and portability. The constraints concern with the scope of the platform. For s-commerce, the generic requirements focus on the interactions that related to the products/services and also processes. That is, the different types of participants interact to improve the products, services, or the processes with a certain level of control (e.g., a degree of freedom that has to be defined by the owner of the product, service, or process). These generic requirements concern with both the front-end and the back-end. That is, (1) what kind of interface the s-commerce platform should present to the participants in order to allow them to interact (participants? perspective) and (2) what kind of inherent computation behind the scene (business owner perspective) the s-commerce system should do, in terms of sensoring products/services/processes, data analysis, machine learning, recommendation algorithms, information retrieval, data mining, etc.

The pervasive social web sites supported by Web 2.0, namely their powerful feature such as connection communication, opinion expression, and content creation/sharing have attracted the attention of researchers in the potential of such technologies for new type of commerce model, referred to as s-commerce. A number of studies have been carried out, covering s-commerce from different perspectives (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013). In (Liang and Turban, 2012), the authors state that social media technologies not only provide a new platform for entrepreneurs to innovate but also raise a variety of new issues for e-commerce researchers that require the development of new theories. The authors have introduced a framework that includes six key elements for classifying social commerce research: research theme, social media, commercial activities, underlying theories, outcomes, and research methods. The framework defines the scope and identifying potential research issues in social commerce. However, most of the current research explores s-commerce from the capabilities and role of social web sites and Web 2.0. In (Lee et al., 2008), the authors reviewed the properties of Web 2.0 and investigated the opportunities for small businesses in the Web 2.0 era. They came with four perspectives of Web 2.0: from a technological perspective, Web 2.0 platform allows information to be used in new ways; from a sociological perspective, Web 2.0 increases social interactions over the web; from economical perspective, Web 2.0 enables and requires new business models; and from legal perspectives, Web 2.0 brings new legal issues to the Web. They found that Web 2.0 applications can largely increase the competitive advantages of small enterprises. Their findings provide some guidelines for small businesses to begin using and leveraging Web 2.0. Indeed, when it comes to reaching customers with rich content, the authors argue that Web 2.0 applications give small enterprises some competitive advantages. In (Constantinides and Fountain, 2008), the authors state that it is essential for marketers to look to Web 2.0 as a challenge rather than a threat and consider it as a new domain of commercial strategy. The authors provide some guidelines to integrate Web 2.0 into the corporate commercial strategy, including recognizing the effect of the Web 2.0 on the consumer's decision making process, understanding the sources of customers? value and the motives of the customers to use Web 2.0. According to the authors, the corporate can capitalize on Web 2.0 in three different ways: (i) understanding how social media function and integrate them, (ii) listen-in to the customer's voice, i.e., what other say about the company, and (iii) engage Web 2.0 for direct, personalized one-to-one marketing, seeking communication, interactions and customer feedback. The authors point out three research directions: (i) identification and classification of the different types of applications from both technological and commercial perspectives, (ii) effects of the Web 2.0 on the consumer perceptions, needs and behavior, and (iii) the value of the Web 2.0 applications as marketing tools and ways to maximize their effectiveness focusing on the questions on how these tools can be incorporated into marketing strategy and become source of business value. In (Grange, and Benbasat, 2010), the authors reported on the effect of online social shopping on user behavior beliefs (perceived usefulness and enjoyment). They found that system functions such as quick access to the products and help option design such as the underlying message guiding the user are strong predictors of the individual belief. Very few studies focus on the s-commerce from perspectives such as modeling, design, or adoption. In (Costa and Tavares, 2011), the authors present the concept of social e-business to define the innovative e-business vision, which integrates web-based collaborative tools, emphasizes the importance of social capital and social networking. The concept of social e-business emerges to enhance collaboration and trust relationships in e-business, integrating and adapting common social network collaborative tools and emphasizes the role of SCM in e-business. They have developed PLAGE platform, an industrial R and D project led by a Portuguese e-procurement service provider, as case study to move towards social e-business by providing a collaborative environment via multiple social platforms. PLAGE reveals that having interoperable social platforms improves commerce collaboration, develops trust, and implements strategic approaches to leverage networked relationships in social e-business. They conclude that organizations should see e-business as an effective instrument to enhance relationships and generate social and economic capital. In (Huang and Benyoucef, 2013), the authors conducted a systematic review, explaining the social commerce concept, presenting a state of art, and describing the relevant features in social commerce design. They presented a conceptual model for social commerce design. Their model is made up of four layers: (i) individual, (ii) conversation, (iii) community, and (iv) commerce. They presented design features for each layer, and common design features for the layers. In (Serrano and Torres, 2010), the authors integrated a variety of social media they refer to as Web 2.0 services such as forums, wiki, blogs social networks, or RSS in collaboratively developing an ERP system for small and medium enterprises (Openbravo project), which results in significantly improving business, social and collaborative capabilities. They also show the necessity for expanding Web 2.0 with Cloud technologies such as Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine that offer a way to easily deploy service without dealing with hardware problems (Armbrust et al., 2010). In (Kim et al., 2010), the authors attempt to organize the status, use, and issues of social web sites into a comprehensive framework. Their aim is to understand, use, build, and forecast the future of social web sites. However, the authors do not show how to build such social sites for business transactions. In (Baghdadi, 2016), the author has developed a framework a framework that shows the relevant elements of s-commerce (Baghdadi, 2016). The framework captures: (i) the relevant conceptual and technological entities of s-commerce, (ii) the relationships between these entities, and (iii) the constraints (if any). It plays the role of an architecture of s-commerce. The framework is meant to guide its realization in terms of a process that distinguishes the architecture, the requirements, the design, and the implementation of a s-commerce web site. In this framework, enterprise social interactions, are considered as first-class citizens and conceptualized as the main building block next to participants, communities, and content. Still there is gap in the specification of the steps of the development process of s-commerce platforms. This work attempts to fill this gap by providing a framework that is geared toward developing social commerce web sites, putting the enterprise social interactions as key, central entities, which would provide a strong business justification for social commerce design and adoption