On the Socialness of Software

Abstract

Conventional software engineering processes are rather transactional and lack a common theory for the involvement of users and their communities. Users are regarded as pure consumers, who are, at most, able to report issues. In the age of easy knowledge access and social media, discounting the users of software might threaten its success. Potentially valuable experiences and volunteered resources get lost. Frustrated users might even meet in social communities to argue against the software and harm its reputation.The goal of this research is to revolutionize the role of users, dissolving the boundaries to software engineers. We propose a novel framework for increasing the software socialness, being the degree of user and community involvement in the software lifecycle. Our framework consists of a benchmark, a process, and a reference architecture. The benchmark includes metrics for assessing and monitoring software socialness. The process enables engineering teams to systematically gather and exploit user feedback in the software lifecycle. The context aware reference architecture integrates social media into software systems and the engineering infrastructure. It observes users' interactions while they use the software and proactively collects in situ feedback.

Microblogging in Open Source Software Development: The Case of Drupal and Twitter

“…Given the large Drupal developer community, we focused on the sub-community that works on Drupal 7 (D7) -a recent branch of Drupal which is self-proclaimed as the "best work yet" We included all 10 Drupal group Twitter accounts listed in the "Social Media Directory" webpage at the Drupal portal. 2 For individual accounts, we obtained a list of 206 D7 contributors in 2008 3 when D7 was still in its main development phase (this number increased to more than 400 at the time of this study in 2012). We used the Drupal Member Directory 4 to locate the Twitter account names of these contributors.…”

“…Among the different social media a significant one is microblogging [1]. Originally intended to provide brief personal text updates, it has rapidly expanded to play a more informative and interactive role in communication and collaboration across a wide variety of organizations and endeavors, including software development which is inherently a socio-technical activity [2], [3]. Most studies of microblogging have focused on enterprise settings.…”

ACon: A learning-based approach to deal with uncertainty in contextual requirements at runtime

“…Further, our work can be combined with techniques that link self-adaptation to enduser feedback for more customized adaptation. Endusers can actively influence the adaptation to satisfy their needs better [41,42,43]. Last, integration of ACon with RELAX-based approaches to uncertainty mitigation is worth exploring [13].…”

Using popular social network sites to support requirements elicitation, prioritization and negotiation

“…Researchers such as Maalej et al [26,27] highlight the importance of end user involvement in today's software development projects. They promote a conceptual framework which combines several existing techniques for better handling continuous user input during the elicitation phase.…”