Requirements-Driven Social Adaptation: Expert Survey

Abstract

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.

The design of adaptive acquisition of users feedback: An empirical study

“…Fig.1, presents an initial application-independent conceptual framework for the design of an adaptive feedback acquisition. It summarizes our expert survey findings in [3] that are related to the motivation of an adaptive acquisition of users' feedback (right side of the figure). In [3], experts in software engineering agreed that availability of an adaptive feedback acquisition is a necessary enabler to decide ways of acquiring feedback and to empower the success of sociallyadaptive software in particular and software systems in general.…”

“…This will have a positive side-effect on the feedback quality and truthfulness, users' involvement as decision makers, users' satisfaction and trust in the system. The good feedback, in quantity and quality, will increase developers knowledge about their users and software and software adaptation and success and help them decide how to evolve it or adjust it to enhance its role in meeting users expectations [3]. Fig.1, presents an initial application-independent conceptual framework for the design of an adaptive feedback acquisition.…”

“…simplicity of feedback requests), privacy issues do not seem to play a highly important role in motivating users to respond to explicit feedback invitations as indicated by the low percentage given by users to privacy reasons (31%). Timing for feedback request has been also highly emphasized by both users and experts as discussed in [3] to be a highly important factor that can negatively or positively affect users' willingness as well as the quality of their feedback. …”

“…The interface design can easily increase or decrease users' willingness to respond to feedback requests. It can also positively or negatively affect the quality of the feedback as discussed in [3]. Users' responses varied on the following design factors:…”

“…text, images and videos) and many of them also include context capturing functionality. Common examples are; UserVoice 1 , Get-Satisfaction 2 , IdeaStorm 3 , VoiceYourView 4 and iRequire [28]. However, all of these tools are limited in terms of adaptivity to various users' behaviour.…”