Abstract-Users' feedback is a main source of knowledge on how users perceive the role of software in meeting their requirements. Collectively, such feedback helps shaping software autonomous and semi-autonomous adaptation decisions of what is called Social Adaptation. It also helps developers to identify loci in the system where an evolution should be introduced in the next release. Despite this role of users' feedback, there is a lack of systematic engineering approaches on how to design its acquisition mechanisms. In this paper, we observe that the acquisition of feedback should be itself adaptive to the context of use. We conduct an empirical study following a mixed-method sequential exploratory approach to explore the main drivers of such adaptation and understand users' attitude when being asked to provide feedback. Our findings are meant to enrich the knowledge base for developers and researchers in users-centric, or crowd-centric, adaptation. It also highlights areas of study for a future research in the area.

Abstract-Software-based motivation refers to the use of technology to enhance the engagement and efficiency of people in performing tasks and following a certain behaviour. Instances of such paradigm include gamification, persuasive technology and entertainment computing. Despite its potential, an adhoc introduction of software-based motivation to a business environment may lead to detrimental effects such as creating pressure and tension, and also reducing quality and authenticity. Hence, we advocate the need for a systematic engineering process to develop software solutions for motivation requirements. One of the challenges is in the high diversity in users' perception and acceptance of motivation strategies and their software-based incarnations. In this paper, we propose the use of personas as an intermediate step which increases efficiency in the engineering process for both engineers and users. We conduct an empirical research and identify elements which describe people with regard to their perception and preferences towards software-based motivational techniques and create a set of exemplary personas to aid the engineering process. We also present guidelines and challenges related to using persona-based engineering methods for software-based motivation.

Abstract-Users' feedback is vital to improve software quality and it provides developers with a rich knowledge on how software meets users' requirements in practice. Feedback informs how software should adapt, or be adapted, at runtime and what evolutionary actions to take in the next release. However, studies have noted that accommodating the different preferences of users on how feedback should be requested is a complex task and requires a careful engineering process. This calls for an adaptive feedback acquisition mechanisms to cater for such variability. In this paper, we tackle this problem by employing the concept of Persona to aid software engineers understand the various users' behaviours and improve their ability to design feedback acquisition techniques more efficiently. We create a set of personas based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies and propose PAFA, a Persona-based method for Adaptive Feedback Acquisition.

Abstract-User feedback is crucial to improve software quality. For example, it can be used to identify missing features and clarify user trends and preferences for future improvement. However, obtaining user feedback is not a 'one-off' process which requires that developers need to gather user feedback in an on-going approach. The problem lies here: the majority of users are generally lack motivation and interest in providing feedback, especially in a constant and frequent style. Moreover, studies have noted that the cultural difference also plays a key role in software designs which will affect how users would like to feedback requests to be designed. In this paper, we advocate that gamification is a powerful technique to maximize users' motivation and change their reaction to feedback requests. We conducted an empirical study and identified some key differences between Western and Middle Eastern users on what motivated them to provide feedback and what could have an influence on the feedback they gave. This also makes the case for the need for a culture-aware gamification in the context of feedback acquisition process.

Abstract. [Context and motivation] Self-adaptation empowers systems with the capability to meet stakeholders' requirements in a dynamic environment. Such systems autonomously monitor changes and events which drive adaptation decisions at runtime. Social Adaptation is a recent kind of requirements-driven adaptation which enables users to give a runtime feedback on the success and quality of a system's configurations in reaching their requirements. The system analyses users' feedback, infers their collective judgement and then uses it to shape its adaptation decisions. [Question/problem] However, there is still a lack of engineering mechanisms to guarantee a correct conduction of Social Adaptation. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we conduct a two-phase Expert Survey to identify core benefits, domain areas and challenges for Social Adaptation.[Contribution] Our findings provide practitioners and researchers in adaptive systems engineering with insights on this emerging role of users, or the crowd, and stimulate future research to solve the open problems in this area.