User involvement has long been considered a critical component of effective system implementation. However, the perspective has suffered from mixed results of empirical tests and the lack of a theoretical explanation for the relationship (Ives and Olson, 1984; Baroudi, et al., 1986). Our purpose is to present a theoreticallygrounded perspective to account for effects of involving users during implementation, and to provide an initial test of this perspective. We propose that: (1) system implementation represents a threat to users’ perceptions of control over their work and a period of transition during which users must cope with differences between old and new work systems; (2) user involvement is effective because it restores or enhances perceived control. Results of a field experiment designed as a preliminary test of this perspective are discussed.

Restoring a Sense of Control during Implementation: How User Involvement leads to System Acceptance.

Mobile app developers constantly monitor feedback in user reviews with the goal of improving their mobile apps and better meeting user expectations. Thus, automated approaches have been proposed in literature with the aim of reducing the effort required for analyzing feedback contained in user reviews via automatic classification/prioritization according to specific topics. In this paper, we introduce SURF (Summarizer of User Reviews Feedback), a novel approach to condense the enormous amount of information that developers of popular apps have to manage due to user feedback received on a daily basis. SURF relies on a conceptual model for capturing user needs useful for developers performing maintenance and evolution tasks. Then it uses sophisticated summarisation techniques for summarizing thousands of reviews and generating an interactive, structured and condensed agenda of recommended software changes. We performed an end-to-end evaluation of SURF on user reviews of 17 mobile apps (5 of them developed by Sony Mobile), involving 23 developers and researchers in total. Results demonstrate high accuracy of SURF in summarizing reviews and the usefulness of the recommended changes. In evaluating our approach we found that SURF helps developers in better understanding user needs, substantially reducing the time required by developers compared to manually analyzing user (change) requests and planning future software changes.

What would users change in my app? summarizing app reviews for recommending software changes

Context For more than four decades it has been intuitively accepted that user involvement (UI) during system development lifecycle leads to system success. However when the researchers have evaluated the user involvement and system success (UI-SS) relationship empirically, the results were not always positive. Objective Our objective was to explore the UI-SS relationship by synthesizing the results of all the studies that have empirically investigated this complex phenomenon. Method We performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) following the steps provided in the guidelines of Evidence Based Software Engineering. From the resulting studies we extracted data to answer our 9 research questions related to the UI-SS relationship, identification of users, perspectives of UI, benefits, problems and challenges of UI, degree and level of UI, relevance of stages of software development lifecycle (SDLC) and the research method employed on the UI-SS relationship. Results Our systematic review resulted in selecting 87 empirical studies published during the period 1980–2012. Among 87 studies reviewed, 52 reported that UI positively contributes to system success, 12 suggested a negative contribution and 23 were uncertain. The UI-SS relationship is neither direct nor binary, and there are various confounding factors that play their role. The identification of users, their degree/level of involvement, stage of SDLC for UI, and choice of research method have been claimed to have impact on the UI-SS relationship. However, there is not sufficient empirical evidence available to support these claims. Conclusion Our results have revealed that UI does contribute positively to system success. But it is a double edged sword and if not managed carefully it may cause more problems than benefits. Based on the analysis of 87 studies, we were able to identify factors for effective management of UI alluding to the causes for inconsistency in the results of published literature.

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A systematic review on the relationship between user involvement and system success

Context Secondary studies are vulnerable to threats to validity. Although, mitigating these threats is crucial for the credibility of these studies, we currently lack a systematic approach to identify, categorize and mitigate threats to validity for secondary studies. Objective In this paper, we review the corpus of secondary studies, with the aim to identify: (a) the trend of reporting threats to validity, (b) the most common threats to validity and corresponding mitigation actions, and (c) possible categories in which threats to validity can be classified. Method To achieve this goal we employ the tertiary study research method that is used for synthesizing knowledge from existing secondary studies. In particular, we collected data from more than 100 studies, published until December 2016 in top quality software engineering venues (both journals and conference). Results Our results suggest that in recent years, secondary studies are more likely to report their threats to validity. However, the presentation of such threats is rather ad hoc, e.g., the same threat may be presented with a different name, or under a different category. To alleviate this problem, we propose a classification schema for reporting threats to validity and possible mitigation actions. Both the classification of threats and the associated mitigation actions have been validated by an empirical study, i.e., Delphi rounds with experts. Conclusion Based on the proposed schema, we provide a checklist, which authors of secondary studies can use for identifying and categorizing threats to validity and corresponding mitigation actions, while readers of secondary studies can use the checklist for assessing the validity of the reported results.

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Identifying, categorizing and mitigating threats to validity in software engineering secondary studies

Researchers have proposed several approaches to extract information from user reviews useful for maintaining and evolving mobile apps. However, most of them just perform automatic classification of user reviews according to specific keywords (e.g., bugs, features). Moreover, they do not provide any support for linking user feedback to the source code components to be changed, thus requiring a manual, time-consuming, and error-prone task. In this paper, we introduce ChangeAdvisor, a novel approach that analyzes the structure, semantics, and sentiments of sentences contained in user reviews to extract useful (user) feedback from maintenance perspectives and recommend to developers changes to software artifacts. It relies on natural language processing and clustering algorithms to group user reviews around similar user needs and suggestions for change. Then, it involves textual based heuristics to determine the code artifacts that need to be maintained according to the recommended software changes. The quantitative and qualitative studies carried out on 44 683 user reviews of 10 open source mobile apps and their original developers showed a high accuracy of ChangeAdvisor in (i) clustering similar user change requests and (ii) identifying the code components impacted by the suggested changes. Moreover, the obtained results show that ChangeAdvisor is more accurate than a baseline approach for linking user feedback clusters to the source code in terms of both precision (+47%) and recall (+38%).

/pdf/recommending-and-localizing-change-requests-for-mobile-apps-9q1m1sgddb.pdf

Recommending and localizing change requests for mobile apps based on user reviews

User participation and involvement in software development are considered to be essential for a successful software system. Three research areas, human aspects of software engineering, requirements engineering, and information systems, study these topics from various perspectives. We think it is important to analyze user participation and involvement in software engineering comprehensively to encourage further research in this area. We investigate the evidence on effects of user participation and involvement on system success and we explore which methods are available in literature. A systematic mapping study was conducted. The systematic search yielded 3,698 hits, from which we identified 289 unique papers. These papers were reviewed by the first author based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The second author validated the selection of papers by reviewing the reasons for exclusion and inclusion and the corresponding papers on a sample base. 58 of the 289 papers were selected (22 statistical survey and meta-study papers and 36 methods papers). Based on the empirical evidence of the surveys and meta-studies, we developed a meta-analysis of structural equation models. This overview demonstrates that most papers showed positive correlations between aspects of development processes (including user participation) and human aspects (including user involvement) and system success. The analysis of the proposed solutions from the method papers revealed a wide variety of user participation and involvement practices for most activities within software development.

Understanding the influence of user participation and involvement on system success - a systematic mapping study.

Understanding the Influence of User Participation and Involvement on System Success --- a Systematic Mapping Study

Researchers have studied how best to involve users in software development for a long time, primarily in the area of information systems and human-computer interaction The authors consider the effects of both user participation and user involvement, which they abbreviate to UPI Existing research describes several benefits of UPI, such as improved quality due to more precise requirements, the prevention of unneeded and expensive features, and an increase in user satisfaction, which leads to higher system use But even though some researchers consider it to be essential to system success, other studies have found contradicting results Furthermore, it's not a common practice in today's IT projects to involve users to a large extent To clarify UPI's effects on system success and to get a deeper understanding of the differences between user participation and user involvement, the authors reviewed the existing UPI literature in software development and conducted a systematic mapping study

Does Involving Users in Software Development Really Influence System Success

[Context and motivation] User participation in software development is considered to be essential for successful software systems Especially missing direct communication between users and developers can cause various issues in large-scale IT projects [Question/Problem] We want to understand current practices of user---developer communication in large-scale IT projects, the factors for, and consequences of communication gaps, and what experts suggest to prevent them [Principal ideas/results]: We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with twelve experts The experts work on the coordination of Business and IT and describe their experiences gained in 69 large-scale IT projects The analysis of our interviews showed that direct user--- developer communication is limited and that no commonly used method for the user---developer communication in the design and implementation activity exists [Contribution]: The interviews helped us to understand current practices and issues resulting from missing communication Furthermore, we can confirm the need for a method enhancing user---developer-communication in large-scale IT projects

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State of Practice of User-Developer Communication in Large-Scale IT Projects

A review of the literature showed that the probability of system success, i.e. user acceptance, system quality and system usage, can be increased by user-developer communication. So far most research on user participation focuses either on early or on late development phases. Especially large IT projects require increased participation, due to their high complexity. We believe that the step in software development when user requirements are translated (and thus interpreted) by developers into a technical specification (i.e. system requirements, architecture and models) is a critical one for user participation. In this step a lot of implicit decisions are taken, some of which should be communicated to the end users. Therefore, we want to create a method that enhances communication between users and developers during that step. We identified trigger points (i.e. changes on initial user requirements), and the granularity level on which to communicate with the end users. Also, representations of changes and adequate means of communication are discussed.

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Ulrike Abelein

Papers

Understanding the influence of user participation and involvement on system success - a systematic mapping study.

Understanding the Influence of User Participation and Involvement on System Success --- a Systematic Mapping Study

Does Involving Users in Software Development Really Influence System Success

State of Practice of User-Developer Communication in Large-Scale IT Projects

A proposal for enhancing user-developer communication in large IT projects