Adaptive software-based Feedback Acquisition: A Persona-based design

Abstract

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.

Crowd Intelligence in Requirements Engineering: Current Status and Future Directions

“…To cater for the diversity of the crowd in requirements elicitation, some effort has been made in term of persona and adaptive feedback acquisition [3]. The foci are on software systems being developed in open environment and offered in open market more than dedicated products for specific customers [3,63].…”

The Crowd in Requirements Engineering: The Landscape and Challenges

“…In practice, user feedback appears in channels such as app stores, 5,15 product forums, and social media platforms such as Twitter. 8 Software companies also can build functionality into their software that lets crowd members give feedback in situ.…”

“…4 However, these approaches miss the opportunity to continuously involve large, heterogeneous groups of users who express their feedback through a variety of media. 2,5,6 This means developers can't consider the diverse backgrounds of user subgroups when they're developing a product's next version. 7,8 So, valuable resources for RE remain unused, and software products might not meet users' needs.…”

Engineering software-based motivation: A persona-based approach

“…Therefore, we advocate the use of personas [15] in order to create a starting point in the design of software-based motivation and also decrease its costs. There are several uses of personas in software engineering, such as using personas in acquiring user feedback [16]. Mainly, using personas can help software engineers to avoid a cold start in user modelling and preferences elicitation.…”