Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

From remembering to envisioning product use: an informal design technique

To be able to get insight in potential use experiences of design proposals, designers would ideally have continuous access to a diverse group of end-users who could give feedback. Since in practice this is not possible designers often have to rely on other sources to be able to reflect on the use issues of their design proposals. Previous research has shown that designers often apply informal techniques to reflect on use issues, in which personal knowledge and experience of previous projects serve as a frame of reference.. However, this knowledge often remains implicit. In this study we explore a technique in which members of a design team make all personal knowledge and assumptions about use in a certain product domain explicit. In this technique we distinguish remembering, imagining, experiencing and envisioning use. The information that is gathered in this way is captured in a matrix which structures use situation aspects and corresponding use issues. These issues concern user experience, usability as well as performance. In three workshops with different designers we explored the benefits and limitations of such a technique. Particularly iterating between remembering, imagining and experiencing worked very well to evoke experiences of the designer

CAMMD: Context Aware Mobile Medical Devices

Telemedicine applications on a medical practitioners mobile device should be context-aware. This can vastly improve the effectiveness of mobile applications and is a step towards realising the vision of a ubiquitous telemedicine environment. The nomadic nature of a medical practitioner emphasises location, activity and time as key context-aware elements. An intelligent middleware is needed to effectively interpret and exploit these contextual elements. This paper proposes an agent-based architectural solution called Context-Aware Mobile Medical Devices (CAMMD). This framework can proactively communicate patient records to a portable device based upon the active context of its medical practitioner. An expert system is utilised to cross-reference the context-aware data of location and time against a practitioners work schedule. This proactive distribution of medical data enhances the usability and portability of mobile medical devices. The proposed methodology alleviates constraints on memory storage and enhances user interaction with the handheld device. The framework also improves utilisation of network bandwidth resources. An experimental prototype is presented highlighting the potential of this approach

Closing the loop: assisting archival appraisal and information retrieval in one sweep

In this article, we examine the similarities between the concept of appraisal, a process that takes place within the archives, and the concept of relevance judgement, a process fundamental to the evaluation of information retrieval systems. More specifically, we revisit selection criteria proposed as result of archival research, and work within the digital curation communities, and, compare them to relevance criteria as discussed within information retrieval's literature based discovery. We illustrate how closely these criteria relate to each other and discuss how understanding the relationships between the these disciplines could form a basis for proposing automated selection for archival processes and initiating multi-objective learning with respect to information retrieval

Considering the User in the Wireless World

The near future promises significant advances in communication capabilities, but one of the keys to success is the capability understanding of the people with regards to its value and usage. In considering the role of the user in the wireless world of the future, the Human Perspective Working Group (WG1) of the Wireless World Research Forum has gathered input and developed positions in four important areas: methods, processes, and best practices for user-centered research and design; reference frameworks for modeling user needs within the context of wireless systems; user scenario creation and analysis; and user interaction technologies. This article provides an overview of WG1's work in these areas that are critical to ensuring that the future wireless world meets and exceeds the expectations of people in the coming decades

Integration of an adaptive infotainment system in a vehicle and validation in real driving scenarios

More services, functionalities, and interfaces are increasingly being incorporated into current vehicles and may overload the driver capacity to perform primary driving tasks adequately. For this reason, a strategy for easing driver interaction with the infotainment system must be defined, and a good balance between road safety and driver experience must also be achieved. An adaptive Human Machine Interface (HMI) that manages the presentation of information and restricts drivers’ interaction in accordance with the driving complexity was designed and evaluated. For this purpose, the driving complexity value employed as a reference was computed by a predictive model, and the adaptive interface was designed following a set of proposed HMI principles. The system was validated performing acceptance and usability tests in real driving scenarios. Results showed the system performs well in real driving scenarios. Also, positive feedbacks were received from participants endorsing the benefits of integrating this kind of system as regards driving experience and road safety.Postprint (published version

Bringing troubled water: quality of experience in a mobile media context

The ICT environment went through notable changes, which have had an irreversible and strong influence on both ICT innovation processes and the role of end-users. In this context, technology developers are increasingly expected to take users’ experiences with technology into account during the process of developing applications or frameworks. As technology is more and more embedded in users’ daily lives, they seek out those personalized values to satisfy their own, situational needs. As a result, a thorough insight in users’ expectations and experiences at various levels (both explicit and more latent) and in different contexts (eg. mobile) has become a crucial determinant for the successful development, introduction and adoption of new ICTs. To this end, our paper focuses on the increased importance of Quality of Experience (QoE). It provides a conceptual model for QoE and furthermore discusses the prevalent gap that still exists between QoE and Quality of Service (QoS). Our main objective is to present a new methodology for correlating user experience to QoS parameters. This methodology was tested in the context of an exploratory interdisciplinary study on QoE-measurement. This new approach goes beyond QoS-parameters and aims to also grasp the social and contextual dimensions of users’ experiences

Revealing the Vicious Circle of Disengaged User Acceptance: A SaaS Provider's Perspective

User acceptance tests (UAT) are an integral part of many different software engineering methodologies. In this paper, we examine the influence of UATs on the relationship between users and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, which are continuously delivered rather than rolled out during a one-off signoff process. Based on an exploratory qualitative field study at a multinational SaaS provider in Denmark, we show that UATs often address the wrong problem in that positive user acceptance may actually indicate a negative user experience. Hence, SaaS providers should be careful not to rest on what we term disengaged user acceptance. Instead, we outline an approach that purposefully queries users for ambivalent emotions that evoke constructive criticism, in order to facilitate a discourse that favors the continuous innovation of a SaaS system. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our approach for the study of user engagement in testing SaaS applications